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Chapter Text

The smell of ink and old paper was already familiar to Hermione Granger, but in this new building, it carried the gravity of promise—and the faintest trace of dread.

King’s College’s Department of Literary Theory occupied the entire north wing of Ashcroft Hall, a grand, crumbling neo-Gothic structure that looked more like a cathedral than part of a university campus. Ivy crawled over the stonework like it had secrets to protect, and arched windows let in light in fractured pieces, stained by age and dust. Turrets rose at odd angles, their stone finials weathered by rain and pigeon droppings, giving the impression that the building was somehow always leaning slightly forward, listening.

Inside, the corridors told a different story. Beneath the vaulted ceilings and dark wooden beams were cold, modern renovations—white walls, polished floors, LED lights that buzzed softly overhead like insects caught behind glass. The air smelled of printer toner, black coffee, and distant chalk. It was a place where intellect sharpened itself against stone.

Hermione’s boots clicked a steady rhythm on the waxed floor as she walked, a leather-bound notebook clutched to her chest and a folded printout of her course schedule tucked beneath her thumb. Her shoulder bag—heavy with texts she hadn’t needed but brought anyway—pulled at her spine.

She had been here less than forty-eight hours.

And already, the myth was circling.

Professor Severus Snape, PhD.

The name had been inked at the top of her supervisor assignment sheet like a sentence passed by a tribunal.
She’d stared at it in the common room, lips slightly parted, while a second-year postgrad named Tariq leaned over and whistled low.

“Damn,” he’d said. “Snape. You’ve got a death wish.”

She didn’t reply. Just folded the paper slowly and tucked it into her coat pocket.

She’d requested him—by name, against the advice of two professors and one well-meaning alum. Boldly. Perhaps stupidly. But she had her reasons.

He was a ghost-story in the department. Tenured at thirty-five. Chair of Literary Modernism, chief editor of Dialectic Quarterly, and a former contributor to Tel Quel, a French theory journal so dense it could induce migraines. He was known to cite Lacan from memory and destroy panelists in debate with surgical precision.

More myth than man.

And she had read him. Twice. Liminal Reading: Irony and Eroticism in Post-War European Fiction had decimated her undergraduate thesis draft in the best way possible. She’d rewritten the entire thing around a single footnote of his. There were lines from that book she could recite like scripture.

Now, she stood outside his office.

The plaque on the door read:

Dr. S. Snape — 3C27
Department Chair | Literary Theory, Modernism, Critical Semiotics

There were no posters. No flyers. No office hours listed. Just the name, engraved in black acrylic.

The corridor was quiet. It was ten minutes before their scheduled appointment, but she didn’t want to seem late—or too eager.

She raised her hand. Knocked once. Sharp.
A pause.

Then came the voice: dry, low, and clipped, as though it were in the middle of cutting something open.

“Come.”

Hermione stepped inside and immediately felt the temperature drop—not literally, though the room was undeniably cool—but in atmosphere. The space was as austere and curated as the man who occupied it. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the far wall, arranged with a meticulousness that bordered on obsessive. The spines were sorted not alphabetically or even chronologically, but by some arcane logic only their owner would understand—perhaps subject, or linguistic origin, or even personal disdain. Every volume had that look of being both ancient and pristine, as though no one but him had ever touched them.

A long, narrow desk sat squarely between the shelves and the door. It was an antique—walnut, she guessed—its surface mostly bare except for a notepad, an obsidian-black fountain pen, and a silver paperweight in the shape of a raven. Behind it, seated like a stone carved from shadow, was Dr. Severus Snape.

He did not rise. His body was relaxed in a way that made the chair seem to conform to him, not the other way around—arms crossed, one long finger absently balancing the pen against his wrist. He looked up slowly when she entered, his expression unreadable, his dark eyes catching the light like wet slate.

“Ms. Granger.”

His voice was low, textured like paper rubbed thin—measured, articulate, and somehow biting even when saying nothing at all.

Hermione stepped forward, instinctively extending her hand. “Yes. Hermione Granger.”

For a moment, he merely looked at her hand, as if it were something mildly offensive—a social convention he neither encouraged nor entertained. Then, without a word, he tilted his head slightly toward the chair opposite his.

The dismissal of the gesture was subtle but unmistakable. She lowered her hand quickly, cheeks coloring as she sat.

His expression did not change. He wasn’t smiling—he wasn’t even frowning—but something about the stillness of his face felt like a criticism all on its own. His eyes, so dark they bordered on black, watched her like a hawk might watch a mouse—not hungrily, but clinically. Hermione felt, for the first time in years, unmoored.

“I’ve read your application,” he said, his voice cutting through the silence like a scalpel through gauze. “Twice. Once when I was asked to approve your placement, and again this morning—when I hoped I might have misremembered it.”

Hermione blinked. “Sir?”

“You listed Derrida in your statement of purpose,” he said, tone bone-dry as he arched a single brow. “And then, in the very next paragraph, you invoked the concept of coherence. An ontological contradiction if ever I’ve seen one.”

It was not a question. It was a slow-motion dissection, and she recognized the scalpel as it touched bone.

But she didn’t flinch. Instead, she straightened, spine lengthening with the kind of posture only someone raised on academic performance could summon. Her chin lifted a fraction.

“Only if one assumes deconstruction is purely nihilistic,” she replied, voice calm but firm. “Which I don’t. I was using coherence in the rhetorical sense. As in framework—not foundation.”

For a beat, the room was utterly silent. Even the air seemed to hold its breath.

Snape stilled. The pen in his hand stopped its rhythm. He looked at her for a long, unsparing moment. His face betrayed nothing. No acknowledgment. No approval.

Then, simply: “Hm.”

Not quite a concession. But not a dismissal, either. From a man like Snape, it may as well have been a standing ovation.

“You’ll be joining my theory seminar on Mondays and Thursdays,” he continued, his tone returning to something matter-of-fact as he pulled a folder from the side of his desk. It was slim, neatly labeled, and no doubt already annotated. “The syllabus is dense. The reading list, denser. You’ll be expected to submit a weekly response paper—typed, double-spaced, citations formatted in the European Modern Language standard, not MLA. If you cite Wikipedia,” he added, pausing to meet her eyes again, “I will incinerate your thesis proposal. With relish.”

Hermione allowed the corner of her mouth to twitch—just once. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He glanced up sharply, narrowing his eyes slightly, as though weighing whether that was sarcasm or sincerity. She wasn’t entirely sure herself.

“I don’t coddle graduate students,” he said, the words clipped and sharpened. “This is not a mentorship in the American sense. Your work will speak for you—or fail you. I do not tolerate excuses, emotional outbursts, or shallow theory regurgitated from blogs, Reddit, or… God help us… TED Talks.”

“Understood,” she replied simply.

Their eyes met—briefly, but with the sharpness of steel drawn too close. It wasn’t the warm, electric meeting of two souls destined for connection. No. It was the measured, precise clash of two minds testing the weight of the other. Like swords catching at the hilt. Like flint daring to spark.

Hermione found his gaze unsettling. Not cruel—not quite—but dissecting. There was nothing passive about it. It was the gaze of a man who had spent his life reading between lines, excavating subtext, and now turned that same lens on her as if she were a sentence in need of parsing. She felt, absurdly, like something pinned to a microscope slide—catalogued, categorized, and ultimately judged.

“You’re young,” he said flatly, as though it were a flaw.

“I’m competent,” she replied, her tone even, cool. Practiced. She was not about to let him dismiss her with a single adjective.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. His silence was a scalpel.

“Arrogance,” he said at last, voice low and crisp, “will get you nowhere here.”

Hermione tilted her chin just a fraction. “Good thing I’m not arrogant,” she said. “Just prepared.”

For the first time, something flickered across his face—an infinitesimal shift in the air between them. Not approval, certainly. But perhaps... amusement. Or was it surprise? It passed in an instant, so fast she might have imagined it. Still, it left a trace behind, like breath fogging a mirror.

Without another word, he reached into the folder before him and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper, clipped neatly and printed in black ink.

“The syllabus,” he said, handing it to her. “Begin with Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. Annotate thoroughly. I expect you to challenge the texts—not summarize them. If you parrot anyone, I’ll know.”

Hermione reached forward and took it. Their fingers brushed—barely. A ghost of contact. His skin was cold, dry and sharp like winter wind against a library windowpane. He withdrew his hand the instant they touched, as though burned. Not in revulsion, but in reflex. As if physicality were a line he never intended to cross.

He returned to his chair like a crow folding its wings. “Office hours are Tuesdays. Ten to noon. Use them.”

She nodded, clutching the packet with both hands. It was heavier than it looked, dense with pages and implications. Still, she did not retreat—not yet.

He glanced back down at his notes. For a moment, it seemed the conversation was over.

Then: “And Ms. Granger.”

She paused, already halfway up from her seat. Their eyes met again.

“You may be used to praise,” he said, his tone devoid of anything resembling kindness. “You won’t find it here.”

Hermione hesitated. And then, with no hesitation at all, turned back to him—spine straight, voice unwavering, eyes lit with the kind of fire that didn’t ask for permission.

“I’m not here for praise,” she said. “I’m here to learn.”

A beat passed.

He didn’t speak. But he didn’t look away, either. His face remained unreadable, carved in the same monochrome stillness as the marble busts in the corridor outside. But something had shifted again—just faintly. She could feel it.

He was not weighing her words.

He was weighing her.

And, perhaps for the first time today, she sensed she hadn’t been found wanting.

She left the office with the syllabus held tight against her chest and her heartbeat thrumming like a drumline beneath her skin.

He hadn’t dismissed her.

That was the first victory.

She would earn the second.

Chapter Text

Hermione sat alone in the university café, a storm of frustration brewing beneath her composed exterior. The rain tapped steadily against the tall windows, a rhythmic backdrop to the sharp sting of red ink bleeding across the pages of her first seminar response paper. It was supposed to be her strongest work yet—thoughtful, nuanced, grounded in the very theories she had long admired. Instead, it felt like a massacre.

The margins were crowded with comments.

“Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘Arcades Project’ offers a framework for understanding urban modernity as a palimpsest of cultural and economic histories, a site where the ideological and the material intersect.”

A neat red underline slashed beneath “framework.” In the margin, Snape’s terse comment:

“Too vague. What kind of framework? Define precisely.”

She continued:

“However, Benjamin’s treatment of the flâneur arguably romanticizes the passive observer, glossing over the active, even subversive, agency of individuals navigating capitalist spaces.”

The phrase “arguably romanticizes” had a squiggly line beneath it, with the note:

“Unsupported assertion. Cite specific passages or critical sources.”

Hermione’s finger traced the underlined words, her mind racing to remember if she’d included the necessary citations. She hadn’t.

Turning the page, she found:

“The concept of coherence within post-structuralist theory is often misunderstood. While Derrida deconstructs fixed meanings, this does not entail the absence of interpretive structures but rather the fluidity and multiplicity of possible readings.”

A red bracket enclosed the whole paragraph, with the note:

“Poorly articulated. Distinguish ‘interpretive structures’ from ‘fixed meanings’ with clearer examples.”

Further down:

“In examining Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, the tension between negation and synthesis challenges the teleological narratives prevalent in dialectical materialism.”

Here, the phrase “challenges the teleological narratives” had a squiggly underline, with the comment:

“Explain how. Your argument here is too abstract.”

Finally, the closing paragraph, where Snape’s harshest criticism awaited:

“In conclusion, while my enthusiasm for integrating these theorists is evident, I recognize the necessity of rigorous, critical engagement to avoid superficial interpretations. This paper serves as an initial exploration that I intend to refine with further research and analysis.”

The margins beside these lines were filled with biting remarks in bold red:

“Your enthusiasm is noted, Ms. Granger, but this reads like a student who hasn’t yet grasped the seriousness of critical theory.”
“Avoid self-indulgent disclaimers.”
“Focus on argument, not intent.”
“Work harder.”

Hermione bit her lip and stared. The edges of the paper curled slightly from her damp fingers. She could have crumpled it, tossed it away, admitted defeat. But something deeper stirred—a stubborn spark she recognized from childhood days spent locked in the Hogwarts library, refusing to let a difficult passage beat her.

She exhaled slowly, smoothing the page against the table. She would confront him. She needed to understand. Why the harshness? Why the rejection when all she had wanted was to prove herself?

The next Tuesday, Hermione arrived at the university early, the damp chill of early morning clinging to her coat as she walked briskly through the near-empty corridors. In her bag, the marked paper felt like a shield—both a reminder of failure and a token of challenge. The hushed silence of the hallway outside Snape’s office amplified the quickening rhythm of her heartbeat, each step measured yet hesitant.

She stopped before the door marked Dr. S. Snape – 3C27 and took a steadying breath. The air was thick with unspoken expectation, the faint scent of old wood and cedar from the doorframe mixing with the sterile university smell.

She knocked sharply.

“Come in,” came the clipped reply, as cold and precise as always.

Pushing the door open, Hermione entered the office. The room was dim, the single narrow window casting a pale gray light that barely softened the sharp lines of Snape’s angular face. He sat behind his spartan desk, a battered copy of Dialectic Quarterly open in front of him. The faint scent of ink, cedar, and something indefinably austere lingered in the air.

She hesitated for a heartbeat, then stepped forward, placing the sheaf of papers carefully on his desk—marked-up pages spread like a battlefield.

“I received your comments,” she said, voice steady but quiet, determined.

Snape’s dark eyes lifted from the journal to meet hers briefly, expression unreadable. Then, as if disinterested, he looked down again at the paper.

“Well?” Hermione pressed, the word taut with urgency.

Snape’s brow lifted in a slow, deliberate arch. “Is this a question or a statement?”

“Both,” she admitted, swallowing the lump rising in her throat. “I’m trying to understand. You didn’t hold back.”

A low sigh escaped him—a rare sound, rough and almost human in its weariness. It was the first crack in his usual armor, but no warmth followed.

“I don’t hold back because I want to wound,” he said, voice quieter now, deliberate. “I do it because I expect rigor. Excellence. There is no room here for complacency.”

Hermione bit her lip, fighting the urge to defend herself with rehearsed phrases about her effort and intent. Instead, she squared her shoulders and met his gaze directly.

“But sometimes your comments feel like… dismissal,” she said carefully, voice dropping an octave. “Like you’re not just correcting mistakes—you’re shutting me down.”

Snape’s eyes narrowed, sharpening like a blade drawn.

“Your work was flawed,” he said bluntly, “and flawed work deserves critique. It is not personal.”

“But it feels personal,” Hermione said, voice barely above a whisper now. “As if you don’t respect me.”

The air thickened between them, charged with something unspoken. Snape’s gaze bore into her, searching, judging.

“I do not owe respect based on youth or enthusiasm,” he said slowly, each word deliberate, “I offer respect where merit demands it. You confuse intellectual rigor with approval.”

A silence fell, heavy and electric.

Hermione’s heart hammered against her ribs, adrenaline flooding her senses. Here was the man she’d admired and feared—a man as unyielding and cold as the stone gargoyles perched on the university roof. Yet beneath that icy exterior, she sensed something else flicker—grudging recognition, maybe even a reluctant admiration for her persistence.

She straightened, pulling herself taller as resolve hardened in her chest.

“Then I’ll earn that respect,” she said firmly, voice clear and unwavering.

Snape’s lips twitched, almost imperceptibly—less a smile than a tightening of muscles.

“Good,” he said, his tone cold but final. “Because I’ll be watching.”

Chapter Text

Hermione’s steps echoed softly as she approached the familiar door—Dr. Snape’s office, 3C27. The late afternoon sun filtered weakly through the narrow window, casting long shadows across the polished floor. Her heartbeat was steady, though the knot of nerves in her stomach tightened with every step. Today, she was armed not only with her marked-up paper but with a stack of questions—specific, pointed, carefully prepared.

Knocking sharply, she heard the familiar clipped reply: “Come in.”

She opened the door and stepped inside, the familiar scent of cedar and ink folding around her like a cloak. Snape sat behind his desk, the lines of his face sharp in the dim light. A half-empty mug of black coffee rested near the edge of the desk, wisps of steam curling in the stale air.

He glanced up, dark eyes briefly assessing her. “Ms. Granger,” he said without inflection.

“Professor Snape,” she replied, placing her papers on the desk with deliberate care. “Thank you for seeing me.”

His gaze flicked to the papers, then back to her. “What do you want?”

The bluntness was expected, but it still sent a thrill of challenge through her veins.

“I want to talk about your comments on my last paper,” she said. “Some of them I understand, but others... not so much. I’d like to clarify.”

Snape leaned back, folding long fingers over one another. “Go on.”

Hermione drew a breath and opened her notebook, flipping to a page scrawled with notes.

“In your margin note on my argument about Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” she began, “you wrote, ‘Too vague. What kind of framework? Define precisely.’ I thought I’d explained the arcades as both a physical space and a metaphorical overlay of cultural narratives. Could you help me understand where I went wrong?”

Snape’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Your language was nebulous. ‘Framework’ is a catch-all term—too broad to engage critically. When you say ‘site where ideological and material intersect,’ you must specify which ideologies, which materials, and how this intersection functions. Without this precision, your argument floats, untethered.”

Hermione nodded, scribbling furiously. “So, I should ground it more explicitly in Benjamin’s descriptions of capitalist commodification and the flâneur’s role?”

“Precisely. Connect your claims to specific passages, or risk superficiality.”

She felt a flicker of respect. This wasn’t just dismissal—it was exacting rigor. “Understood.”

She turned to another note. “You also wrote ‘Unsupported assertion’ next to my critique of the flâneur’s romanticization. I cited Benjamin’s text, but not any secondary critics. Were you expecting additional sources?”

Snape’s gaze sharpened. “Citations serve as scaffolding, not ornamentation. When you make an interpretive claim, you must anchor it with critical dialogue. Which voices support or contradict your reading? Contextualize. Otherwise, it’s opinion, not analysis.”

Hermione chewed the inside of her cheek. “That makes sense. I’ll include more scholarly debate next time.”

He inclined his head, a gesture both minimal and significant.

“But your writing style,” he added, “is still a barrier. Passivity weakens authority. ‘Arguably romanticizes’ is tentative. Choose stronger verbs, make bolder claims—then defend them.”

She frowned, considering the weight behind his words. She had been taught academic humility was a virtue; here, it was a liability.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “More confidence, more precision.”

Snape’s eyes flicked to her face, as if weighing her resolve.

“Now,” Snape said abruptly, his voice cutting through the quiet like a scalpel, “what about your closing paragraph? I called it ‘self-indulgent’ and ‘premature.’ Care to explain yourself?”

Hermione hesitated, the weight of his words pressing down on her. She glanced down at her notes, then met his gaze steadily. “I was trying to acknowledge my limitations,” she said carefully, “to show that I’m open to growth—acknowledging that my argument isn’t final, that there’s room for development.”

Snape’s eyes narrowed slightly, the shadow of a frown crossing his face. “Then you’ve missed the point entirely,” he said flatly, leaning forward with hands clasped on the desk. “In academic writing, the argument must stand on its own merits. A conclusion is not a place for tentative hand-wringing or requests for sympathy. If your conclusion is filled with doubt, your entire paper loses impact. You cannot ask your reader to forgive your uncertainty. You present your claim boldly, then you defend it with evidence. Anything less is a failure of conviction.”

A heavy silence fell between them, thick and charged, filled with all the things left unsaid—the expectations, the pressure, the unspoken challenge that hovered in the space between mentor and student.

Hermione’s fingers twisted nervously around her pen, the metal cool and solid grounding her. “It’s hard,” she admitted softly, “to balance being thorough with being decisive. I don’t want to overlook complexities, but I also don’t want to seem unsure of my own argument.”

For the first time, Snape’s gaze softened just a fraction, the ice cracking enough to reveal a sliver of something almost like understanding. “Good,” he said quietly, his tone less severe but no less serious. “Because that is precisely the skill you must master. Mastery of theory isn’t just about knowledge—it’s about clarity, precision, and unwavering confidence in your conclusions.”

Hermione looked up, surprise flickering in her eyes at the unexpected encouragement hidden beneath his usual stern demeanor. The challenge wasn’t softened; it was refined.

Their eyes locked, two sharp minds circling each other in a quiet duel—one demanding mastery, discipline, and rigor; the other striving to prove herself worthy, determined to rise to the challenge.

For a brief, suspended moment, the air between them shifted—charged, fragile, as if the space held a secret understanding that neither was quite ready to voice.

Then, with a sudden clearing of his throat, Snape rose abruptly from his chair, the commanding presence snapping back into place like a well-fitted mask.

“This is not a social call,” he said brusquely, voice low but carrying unmistakable finality. “You will revise your paper with these points in mind. Next week, I expect something stronger, more precise, and decidedly less tentative.”

Hermione nodded, gathering her papers carefully with deliberate, measured movements. Her mind buzzed with a thousand thoughts, each one a question or a spark of resolve.

As she turned toward the door, an unexpected question slipped past her lips before she could stop it, the weight of curiosity and uncertainty pressing her forward.

“Professor Snape—may I ask something else?”

He paused, gaze fixed on the edge of his desk, then gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod. “Proceed.”

She hesitated, then asked, “Why do you insist on such ruthless precision? Is it just about the work? Or… is there something more?”

Snape’s eyes flicked up, sharp and unreadable. For a long moment, he said nothing.

Then, unexpectedly, he leaned back in his chair, folding his arms, the usual stiffness in his posture loosening just slightly.

“Critical theory is not just a discipline,” he said slowly, “It is a form of survival. A way to dissect the world’s lies and facades, to expose what lies beneath. If you cannot wield your arguments with surgical clarity, your work becomes as meaningless as a whisper in a storm.”

Hermione nodded, intrigued by this glimpse beneath his usual reserve.

He tapped a long, slender finger against the polished surface of his desk, the sharp tap tap tap breaking the charged silence between them. “Philosophy, poetry—they are not luxuries here,” Snape said slowly, his voice low and deliberate. “They are tools. Tools to dissect, to reconstruct, to reveal truths hidden beneath layers of convention. Poetry, especially, teaches us to see the world differently—to recognize patterns, silences, and fractures others miss entirely.” His eyes flickered with a rare intensity as if the words were not merely academic but deeply personal.

Hermione allowed herself a faint, almost shy smile. “I do love poetry,” she confessed quietly, feeling a thread of warmth in the austere room.

Snape’s lips twitched ever so slightly—was it approval?—and his voice darkened, taking on an edge that felt almost like a challenge. “Of course you do. You’re not here to waste your time on shallow academic posturing or surface-level analysis. You came here to wrestle with the hard questions.”

She inhaled deeply, emboldened by his words and the fleeting softness beneath his usual harshness. “Do you ever find it... frustrating?” Hermione asked, her tone gentle but probing. “The way critical theory can sometimes get trapped in jargon, losing its power, its clarity?”

Snape’s eyes narrowed, the room seeming to grow colder as he considered her question. “More often than you’d believe,” he replied with a bitterness that wasn’t entirely academic. “It is the curse of academia—turning even the sharpest, most radical ideas into labyrinths of obscure language and impenetrable prose. But that,” he tapped the desk once more for emphasis, “is why precision matters. It’s a blade that cuts through the fog of obfuscation and reveals the core of the argument.”

A silence settled over them, heavy and profound, thick with a mutual understanding that transcended the formal teacher-student relationship.

Hermione found herself venturing into dangerous territory, her voice softening with something between curiosity and sympathy. “Does it ever feel lonely? This pursuit of clarity, this relentless demand for perfection?”

For the first time, Snape’s gaze darkened, shadows flickering across his angular features. His usual impenetrable mask cracked for a heartbeat, revealing a glimpse of something raw and vulnerable beneath. “Yes,” he said quietly, the single word carrying the weight of years of isolation and relentless expectation. “The higher the standards, the fewer who can keep pace. It isolates you, Miss Granger.”

Hermione felt an unexpected kinship, as though a fragile bridge had formed between their very different worlds. The man who terrified the department and challenged her intellect had just revealed a deeply human fracture.

But then, with a swift motion, the moment shattered like glass.

Snape rose abruptly from his chair, the commanding presence snapping back into place with the ease of a well-worn mask. His eyes, now cold and unreadable again, fixed on her with clinical precision.

“This conversation ends now,” he declared sharply, voice low but carrying undeniable authority. “You have work to do. I expect your revisions by Monday. No excuses.”

Hermione blinked, caught between a wave of relief and a twinge of disappointment at how suddenly the fragile connection had been severed.

She gathered her papers, steadying her trembling hands, and nodded firmly. “Thank you, Dr. Snape. For your honesty. I’ll take your advice seriously.”

He gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod, his gaze already returning to the scattered papers on his desk as if she were already a problem to be solved.

As she turned toward the door, Hermione’s mind raced with thoughts, questions, and a newfound determination. She was beginning to understand that learning under Snape’s exacting eye would demand more than intellectual effort—it would require resilience, courage, and perhaps a willingness to face the loneliness of the pursuit.

The door closed behind her with a quiet click, leaving the room steeped once more in silence and the faint scent of cedar and ink.

He was harsh. Demanding. Unyielding.

But beneath it all, there was something more—something she was only beginning to glimpse.

And she knew she would return. Again and again.

Because learning from Snape was no longer just an academic exercise.

Chapter Text

The soft clink of glasses and low hum of polite conversation filled the large lecture hall, now transformed into an impromptu party space. Fairy lights twinkled overhead, casting a warm, amber glow that softened the harsh academic austerity of the Department of Literary Theory. The faculty and graduate students milled about, clutching wine glasses and plates of cheese, crackers, and crudités. It was one of those obligatory mixers—meant to foster collegiality, but more often a breeding ground for thinly veiled competitiveness and guarded small talk.

Hermione stood near the edge of the crowd, feeling like an island amid a sea of half-known faces. She tugged at the hem of her dress—a deep burgundy sheath with a modest slit along the thigh. It wasn’t her usual armour of sensible blouses and tailored jackets. Ginny had been relentless about it.

Earlier that night, Hermione sat cross-legged on her bed, a stack of books and notes pushed aside as Ginny paced back and forth, her fiery curls bouncing with each step. The evening light filtered softly through the curtains, casting a warm glow over the room. Ginny’s eyes sparkled with mischief and determination.

“Hermione, honestly,” Ginny began, tossing a bright scarf onto the dresser, “you can’t keep hiding behind those oversized sweaters and buttoned-up collars. It’s like you’re wearing your brain as armour, and trust me, it’s a good thing you’re brilliant because you look like you’re trying to blend into the wallpaper.”

Hermione raised an eyebrow, folding her arms. “I’m not sure this is the time for a fashion critique.”

Ginny laughed, plopping down beside her with a thud. “It’s not about fashion. It’s about presence. You want to be seen, right? Not just as the clever grad student who quotes Derrida but as someone with fire.”

Hermione glanced down at the dark blouse and cardigan she’d been wearing all week—safe, neutral, unassuming. “I’m not sure ‘fire’ is really my thing.”

“Exactly why you need to try.” Ginny’s voice softened, a rare earnestness creeping in. “Look, you’re the smartest person I know. But sometimes people only see what you let them see. Confidence is a kind of language—nonverbal. It’s the tilt of your chin, the way you hold your glass, the spark in your eyes. Tonight, wear that.”

Hermione hesitated, then nodded slowly. “Alright, but I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard.”

Ginny grinned, pulling open Hermione’s wardrobe. “Not trying too hard, just trying something new.” She rifled through hangers and pulled out a sleek, deep burgundy dress. “This. It’s elegant, a little daring, but still you.”

Hermione held it up, the fabric smooth between her fingers. The modest slit along the thigh made her pulse quicken—a subtle hint of boldness she’d never dared before.

Ginny’s grin widened. “Trust me, Hermione. When you step into that party, you’ll command attention—not because of what you say, but because of who you are.”

Hermione took a deep breath, allowing herself to imagine that version of herself—the woman who could stand out without losing herself.

“I’ll do it,” she said finally.

Ginny clapped her hands excitedly. “Yes! Now, let’s get you ready.”

So Hermione had listened, stepped outside her comfort zone, and worn something daring—not scandalous, but undeniably different. She caught her reflection in a nearby window: poised, with a quiet flame in her eyes.

The door to the party opened suddenly, and a hush rippled through the room. Severus Snape appeared, late as usual, his black suit impeccably tailored but his expression unreadable. His dark eyes swept over the gathering, barely registering anyone before settling on a far corner of the room. Without hesitation, he slipped past the clusters of guests and disappeared toward the bar.

Hermione felt a strange mix of anticipation and anxiety. Despite their fraught meetings and icy exchanges, there was something magnetic about Professor Snape—something that unsettled and intrigued her in equal measure.

As the party buzzed around her, she sipped her wine and tried to lose herself in polite conversation with a few graduate students. But her attention kept drifting back toward the dark corner near the bar where Snape had settled.

Minutes stretched into what felt like hours as Hermione lingered near the far corner of the softly lit room, her fingers curling tightly around the stem of her wine glass. The low hum of polite conversation swirled around her—small clusters of faculty exchanging nods and laughter, the occasional clink of glasses punctuating the steady murmur. Despite the warmth of the room, a cool tension wrapped around her chest, a subtle reminder that here, in this gilded but guarded world, she was still something of an outsider.

She had been scanning the crowd, trying to find familiar faces, or even just someone who might offer a friendly smile, when the unmistakable timbre of Severus Snape’s voice cut through the chatter. It was quiet, deliberate, but carried the unmistakable weight of authority that commanded attention without effort.

“...Miss Granger’s thesis proposal is ambitious, yes,” Snape was saying, his tone measured but firm, “but it’s grounded in rigorous scholarship and a keen understanding of theoretical nuance. It’s not a mere student’s whimsy. I expect it to provoke meaningful debate.”

The words hit Hermione like a sudden gust of wind, sharp and unexpected. She froze mid-motion, her glass halfway to her lips, the warmth of the wine forgotten as her eyes locked onto the scene unfolding near the centre of the room.

Snape stood with his usual composed posture, dark robes hanging clean and unwrinkled despite the late hour. His face was set in that familiar mask of controlled intensity, but there was something in his voice—a rare conviction, a grudging respect—that Hermione had not heard directed toward her before.

Opposite him stood Professor Langdon, a senior faculty member known for his conservative views and sharp tongue. His brow was furrowed in scepticism as he replied, “Really? I found the topic rather... unconventional.”

Snape’s eyes flicked briefly to Langdon, narrowing with a subtle edge. “Unconventional, perhaps, but necessary. Miss Granger’s approach challenges entrenched paradigms with a precision many fear to attempt.”

Hermione’s heart thrummed loudly in her ears. Each word felt like a small victory, a crack in the frosty barrier she had assumed was impenetrable. She hadn’t expected him to speak of her so publicly—especially not in praise, and certainly not with such measured seriousness.

The conversation continued, their voices low but charged.

Langdon pressed, “Do you believe the department is ready for such a radical reinterpretation? Her focus on marginal voices within post-war literature is certainly bold, but some might see it as overreach.”

Snape’s reply was cold and unwavering. “Academia’s purpose is not to maintain comfort but to provoke thought. Miss Granger’s work embodies the rigor and daring that this institution ought to foster. If the department cannot embrace that, it has failed its mission.”

A ripple of murmurs spread through the nearby listeners, some nodding subtly, others exchanging glances. Hermione’s pulse quickened, her fingers tightening around the cool glass.

She took a step back, easing herself out of the immediate vicinity, blending into the crowd as she processed what she’d just heard. Her mind raced—had she misread him all along? Was the cold exterior, the relentless critique, merely a shield for something deeper? A kind of respect that was earned, carefully guarded, and sparingly given?

The thought unsettled her, but also sparked a flicker of hope. Maybe this world wasn’t as impenetrable as she feared. Maybe there was a place for her voice here, after all.

Hermione exhaled slowly, forcing herself to smile faintly as she turned away, weaving through the gathering. The party hummed on around her, but now the room felt just a little less vast, the shadows a little less daunting.

Hermione’s gaze swept the room as she retreated to a quieter corner, still reeling from Snape’s unexpected defence. The low buzz of conversations drifted around her—snatches of laughter, clinking glasses, the murmured exchange of academic gossip. Faces blurred into one another, but then she spotted a familiar figure standing near the bookshelves: Padma Patil, a fellow graduate student known for her sharp intellect and even sharper wit.

Padma caught Hermione’s eye and offered a small, knowing smile. “He surprised you, didn’t he?” she murmured as Hermione joined her.

Hermione nodded, still clutching her glass a little too tightly. “I wasn’t expecting him to speak so openly, especially not like that.”

Padma shrugged lightly, leaning casually against the wall. “Snape’s not one for compliments. When he does, it means something. You must have earned it.”

Hermione allowed herself a brief smile, grateful for the quiet solidarity. “It’s just... hard to reconcile that side of him with the Snape I see in class. And the one who tears apart every sentence I write.”

Padma’s eyes flickered with understanding. “Maybe that’s his way of pushing you—forcing you to be better. He doesn’t do easy.”

“Easy isn’t exactly what I’m aiming for,” Hermione said, the fire in her chest rekindling.

They fell into a thoughtful silence, their eyes drifting across the room as the party unfolded around them. Groups of faculty members clustered in pockets of animated discussion, voices rising and falling as they debated obscure theories with a fervor that only insiders could truly appreciate. The hum of specialized jargon floated through the air — terms like “interpellation,” “dialectics,” and “hermeneutics” weaving in and out of conversations like a secret code. Some professors gestured passionately, their hands carving the air with the intensity of their convictions, while others listened intently, nodding slowly as if weighing each word with the precision of a scalpel.

Nearby, students moved more cautiously, their smiles sometimes tight, sometimes genuine, as they tried to find their footing in the intricate social dance of academia. Some leaned into clusters of peers, whispering nervously about deadlines, upcoming presentations, or whispered rumors of departmental politics. Others hesitated at the edges of conversations, casting furtive glances in the direction of more established faculty, hoping to catch a moment of recognition or approval. The low murmur of ambition and anxiety mingled beneath the polished veneer of polite conversation, creating an undercurrent of tension that was almost tangible.

The room itself felt alive with history and unspoken expectation. Soft clinks of glasses punctuated the background chatter, and occasional laughter — sometimes genuine, sometimes forced — rippled through the crowd like small bursts of warmth in an otherwise formal atmosphere. It was a night layered with meaning: celebration, competition, and the quiet, relentless pursuit of knowledge. In that moment of shared silence, they both felt the weight of it all pressing gently around them — the hopes, the doubts, and the fragile connections that held the academic world together.

Hermione’s thoughts returned to Snape’s words, to the rare moment of respect she'd glimpsed. The room suddenly felt less like a gauntlet and more like a place where, perhaps, she could carve out her own space—if she was willing to meet the challenge head-on.

Padma glanced at her, breaking the silence. “Whatever happens, don’t lose that spark. It’s what they fear most.”

Hermione met her friend’s gaze, a quiet determination settling over her. “I won’t.”

Chapter Text

It was a Thursday afternoon, and the seminar room in the corner of the English Department building was already too warm. The radiator clicked faintly beneath the windows, and the air held that end-of-week weight—dense with fatigue, overanalysis, and anticipation. The walls, lined with faded posters of long-dead theorists and equally faded institutional paint, seemed to press inward with a subtle kind of pressure.

Fifteen graduate students sat in a rough circle, the arrangement intended to promote egalitarian discourse but always managing to emphasize hierarchies instead. Battered copies of The Madwoman in the Attic, Gender Trouble, and The Laugh of the Medusa lay open on desks and laps like weapons waiting to be drawn. Half the room looked ready to pounce; the other half looked exhausted by the very idea of pouncing.

At the head of the room stood Snape.

He wasn’t lecturing. Not yet. He stood motionless, arms folded, a single page of typed notes in one pale hand—untouched, unread, and likely unnecessary. His gaze swept the room with cool detachment, but there was a tension in his posture that Hermione recognized from his office hours: controlled restraint. Readiness. The kind that meant he expected something to happen.

The topic that week was feminist literary theory.

It had already sent ripples through the department’s halls—tart remarks near the coffee machine, muttered gripes during library hours. The readings were confrontational, unapologetic. The syllabus that week bore names that stirred academic reverence and dismissal in equal measure: Cixous, Irigaray, Rich, Butler.

No one wanted to be the first to speak.

Until Langston opened his mouth.

Langston, a lean graduate student with a manicured beard and a voice trained in the mirror, cleared his throat with the confidence of someone convinced of his own insight.

“I just think,” he began, casually waving a bitten pen cap in the air like a conductor’s baton, “that while Butler’s ideas about performativity are certainly... provocative, applying them retroactively to canonical texts feels less like legitimate criticism and more like political wish-fulfilment. A kind of revisionist fantasy.”

A few students gave each other sideways glances. One stifled a sigh.

Hermione didn’t blink. She waited—just long enough to confirm that Snape wasn’t going to step in.

He didn’t. His gaze slid to her with clinical expectation.

She took it as an invitation.

“Then you misunderstand the goal of feminist theory,” she said, her tone crisp but controlled. “It’s not about rewriting the past—it’s about revealing the structures that shaped it. It’s not fantasy; it’s excavation. Power leaves traces. Feminist critique reads those traces.”

Langston leaned back slightly in his chair, smirking. “So we’re supposed to read gender into every text, even when it’s not there?”

Hermione leaned forward. “It is there. Gender isn’t a theme you tack on like an afterthought—it’s a fundamental element of how narratives are constructed, how characters are coded, how stories are told and interpreted. Just because earlier critics ignored it doesn’t mean it wasn’t shaping the text all along.”

He scoffed. “Isn’t that just projecting ideology onto literature?”

Hermione's jaw tightened. “No more than Marxist theory ‘projects’ class onto Dickens, or postcolonial theory ‘projects’ empire onto Conrad. The difference is who’s been allowed to shape the so-called neutral critical tradition in the first place.”

The room was growing quieter. Even those typically disinterested were now leaning in.

Langston raised an eyebrow. “Still sounds reductive. These theories flatten complexity. It all becomes male/female, oppressor/oppressed. Where’s the nuance in that?”

Hermione turned fully toward him, eyes narrowing. “Feminist theory doesn’t flatten literature. It refuses to romanticize its injustices. And it doesn’t replace one hierarchy with another—it forces us to see the power structures we’ve been trained to read past. If that challenges your idea of neutrality, then that’s the point. The personal is political. Always has been.”

A sharp silence fell. Someone across the circle muttered, “Damn.” Another scribbled furiously in the margins of their notes.

Snape moved, then. Slowly. Deliberately. He set down his unused page of notes with a soft tap against the desk’s surface, the sound somehow final.

“That,” he said, voice low and silk-edged, “was a proper response.”

Hermione blinked, caught off guard by the acknowledgment. Her face was hot—not just with heat but with something more volatile. Pride? Fury? Maybe both.

Snape’s dark eyes met hers—calculating, unreadable. “Ms. Granger, you argue with precision,” he said. “Though I would suggest that nuance is a more persuasive ally than righteous indignation.”

Then, with the same cool sharpness, he turned to Langston. “Mr. Langston, you might consider revisiting Butler before attempting to reduce her theory to a matter of tone.”

Langston said nothing. His smirk had vanished.

The seminar continued, but the energy had changed. Where once there was hesitation, there was now tension—focused, simmering, alive. Students leaned into their books and into the discussion with a new kind of alertness.

Hermione remained composed, but she could feel the weight of eyes on her. Not all were friendly. Some appraising. Some surprised. But one gaze, more than any other, lingered without ever quite looking at her directly.

When the session ended, she left the room with her annotated copy of Gender Trouble clutched in one hand and her notebook pressed against her ribs. Her pulse still thudded under her skin, a rhythm that refused to quiet. It wasn’t just adrenaline anymore. Something had shifted—inside her, yes, but also between them.

She hadn’t just defended a theory.

She’d been seen.

And for the first time, maybe, she had seen him too—not just as a professor or an adversary, but as someone who noticed the way her mind moved.

That, somehow, was more dangerous than all the theory in the room.

The corridor outside his office was quiet, save for the ticking of the old radiators and the distant clatter of someone photocopying on another floor. Hermione stood before the heavy oak door, a slim folder clutched in one hand, the other raised in hesitation.

Then she knocked—sharper than usual. Not angry, but certain.

From inside: “Enter.”

She opened the door and stepped inside.

Snape was seated at his desk, reading a book she couldn’t immediately identify—bound in worn black leather, no dust jacket, no title on the spine. He didn’t mark his place with a finger or slip of paper; he simply closed it, as if he had memorized the page number out of habit. It made her wonder how many times he’d read it already.

“Ms. Granger,” he said coolly, not bothering to mark his page before closing the worn book in front of him. His voice, as always, carried that quiet gravity—the kind that made even silence feel like a verdict.

Hermione stepped into the office, letting the door close behind her with a soft click. The space felt smaller than usual, though she knew it was just her pulse heightening her senses. She moved to the chair across from him and sat without waiting for an invitation. It was a small breach of etiquette, but a deliberate one. Her shoulders were squared, spine straight, every motion controlled. She hadn’t come to posture. She’d come to speak plainly—and perhaps to test something unspoken between them.

“About last Thursday,” she began, her voice clear despite the pressure building behind her ribs.

Snape regarded her with unreadable calm, his fingers steepled just beneath his chin. “Yes?”

“I didn’t come to apologize,” she said quickly—too quickly, she realized a beat too late. The words had an edge to them she hadn’t intended, as if defending herself from a blow that hadn’t been delivered.

“I didn’t expect you to,” he replied evenly. There was no trace of mockery in his tone. Just that same cool directness that made her feel, sometimes, as though he were dissecting every sentence she spoke for structural integrity.

A taut silence stretched between them. Not hostile—just dense, like a thread being wound tighter. She glanced down at her folder and adjusted a paperclip along the edge, the gesture more about grounding herself than organizing anything useful. Then she looked up again, steadying.

“You said I argue with precision.”

“I did.” His tone remained flat, but there was no dismissiveness in it—no sarcasm. Just the bare, crystalline truth of a statement he didn’t feel the need to qualify or soften.

She inhaled slowly, feeling the heat rising in her cheeks though she wasn’t sure why. “I’ve never heard you compliment a student before.”

Snape tilted his head ever so slightly, his eyes narrowing—not in disapproval, but in thought. “I compliment clarity when I see it,” he said at last. “Your argument had sharpness, structure, and control. I disagreed with your tone, not your position.”

There was no flattery in his words—just an unexpected precision, the kind that always made her feel as though the air had changed temperature. She nodded slowly, letting it land. She had not realized how much it would matter to hear those words from him, of all people. Not because she needed validation, but because his standards were almost inhuman. Because if he thought she had reached a level of skill worth naming, then perhaps—just perhaps—she had.

She sat very still for a moment, her heart thudding in that quiet, deliberate way it always did when she felt something shifting under the surface of things. She hadn’t come here seeking praise. But now that it had arrived, it lodged in her chest like a lit coal.

“It meant something,” she said quietly, “coming from you.”

Snape’s expression didn’t change, but his gaze lingered. “Then let it mean this: your thesis, if it continues along this trajectory, will be difficult to dismiss. Even by those eager to do so.”

There was a pause—not just between them, but inside her. Something stilled, then cracked open. Hermione felt it then, unmistakable: a slow, unfamiliar warmth unfurling through her. Not quite pride, and not quite affection. It was recognition. That rare moment of being seen—not just for what she produced, but for how her mind worked, for what she dared to believe was worth arguing.

She parted her lips to respond, the beginnings of a thank-you or a question catching in her throat—but he was already moving.

With a controlled slowness that suggested ritual rather than habit, he reached down and opened the lower drawer to his right—not the shallow one where he kept grading pens and appointment slips, but the deeper, seldom-used compartment beneath. Hermione watched his hand disappear into its shadowed depths, heard the quiet shift of paper against wood, the faint creak of something time-worn being lifted.

He pulled out a book.

It was slim and bound in leather so dark it looked black until it caught the light, where it revealed the warm mahogany undertone of age. The spine was soft, worn smooth by years of handling, the corners gently rounded, as if someone had held it too tightly too often. There was no dust jacket, no visible title or publisher’s mark—just that aged, textured cover, rich and quiet like a secret.

He placed it on the desk between them—not with his usual efficiency, but with a kind of reverence. As though it were not merely a book, but a gesture.

“Adrienne Rich,” he said, voice calm but deliberate. “Twenty-One Love Poems. First edition. Long out of print.”

Hermione stared at it, blinking once. Then again. For a moment she didn’t reach for it, unsure if she was truly meant to. The air between them felt different now—more fragile, almost ceremonial.

“You’re lending me poetry?” she asked at last, the words emerging in a near whisper.

“I’m suggesting you read it,” he corrected, not unkindly. “Carefully. Especially poem XIII. Her understanding of power, and how it shapes intimacy—” He paused, as though selecting the word cost something. “—is useful.”

Hermione reached for the book slowly, fingertips grazing the leather before lifting it into her hands. It was heavier than it looked, the kind of weight that suggested meaning. She opened it as though opening a box of breathless memory. The paper inside was thick, soft to the touch, its off-white pages printed in a typeface that looked like it might vanish under too harsh a light. The poems didn’t scream. They waited.

“I didn’t think you—” she began, then stopped, unsure whether to finish the thought. That you read poetry. That you felt things deeply enough to admire this. “I wouldn’t have expected you to admire Rich.”

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile—Snape didn’t smile—but an acknowledgment. “You mistake admiration for agreement,” he said. “I value precision. Lucidity. She wields both with… startling economy.”

She lowered her eyes to the book again. “Thank you,” she said softly, sincerely. And she meant it—not just for the loan, but for the trust implicit in it.

Snape inclined his head just enough to signal he had accepted the thanks. His expression remained carefully composed, but his gaze held hers a moment longer than necessary.

“Return it uncreased,” he said, “and you may borrow another.”

Hermione held the book more tightly. Something in her throat ached—not with sadness, but with awareness. Of what this meant. Of what he had just offered, and what he hadn’t said.

Their eyes met—briefly, but with weight. The kind of look that stays behind even after you’ve looked away. There was no softness in his expression, no open invitation. And yet, something passed between them in that moment: a flicker of understanding, or something more precarious. A recognition of intellect, of will, of something not quite nameable but undeniably present.

She stood, the book now cradled in both hands as though it were something more delicate than paper. She gave a single nod—more formal than she’d intended—and stepped toward the door.

“Ms. Granger,” he said, just as she reached for the handle.

She turned back.

“Precision,” he said again, the word curling around her like smoke. “Does not preclude passion. In argument… or in art. Remember that.”

Her mouth opened slightly, but she didn’t speak. She couldn’t. She only nodded again—this time slower, her eyes lingering on his—before slipping from the room with the book pressed against her chest, heart loud in her ears.

That night, Hermione sat curled beneath a faded quilt on her sofa, her flat silent except for the low ticking of the radiator. Outside, the streetlights cast long stripes through the blinds, but inside the room there was only warmth, shadow, and the weight of something new.

She opened the slim volume slowly, turning past the earlier pages with careful fingers. She read the earlier poems dutifully, even admiringly—but her eyes kept drifting forward. To XIII. To the one he had named. The one he’d marked, not with ink, but with intention.

And when she reached it—just past the midpoint of the book—she felt something catch in her chest. Like breath, like memory. Like something she hadn't realized she was holding back.

She read:

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn…

The words hit her like heat through fabric, slow but inexorable. They weren’t loud. They didn’t shout. But they dismantled. Rules break. Maps fail. She read on, lips barely moving now, barely breathing.

whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years…

She stopped. Hermione, the woman who lived by outlines and citations, who mapped arguments like architects draw blueprints, felt something shift deep beneath her certainty. These weren’t just lines about love or rebellion. They were about the impossibility of fitting feeling into systems. About building new lexicons for desire, intellect, and revolt when the old ones collapse.

She read the rest aloud, as if saying it might make it less dangerous:

we’re driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear—
neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
but a woman’s voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

Hermione stared down at the page for a long time, her thumb resting in the spine crease without pressure, careful not to leave a mark.

It was beautiful. But it was also unsettling.

This poem, this choice, this gesture—it wasn’t neutral. It wasn’t academic.

A woman’s voice singing old songs with new words. Women outside the law.

What did he mean her to take from this?

That intimacy is invented?

That rules fail?

That there is power in the unknown—power, and danger, and maybe something like truth?

She sat back, book still open on her lap, and let the silence expand. Her mind kept replaying his words: Her understanding of power… is useful.

But he hadn’t just meant power. Not really. Or not only.

Something warm stirred at the edges of her thoughts—an understanding not yet fully formed. An anticipation. An invitation, maybe, though veiled. Or perhaps a test. One only she could pass.

She would return the book, uncreased. Of course she would.

But as the hours passed, and the lamplight grew dimmer, and the space around her felt both too large and too close, Hermione Granger admitted to herself:

She would not return unchanged.

And she would never again pretend that her work—her mind—was separate from her body.

Because this was the truth the poem had named: the personal is political.

And the map she’d trusted was, after all, out of date.

Chapter Text

The building was nearly empty when Hermione returned.

It was the kind of cold that crept beneath clothing and settled in the bones. Rain slicked the pavement outside, a constant whisper against stone and glass. The heavy wooden doors of the English Department groaned as she pushed them open, their iron hinges protesting the late hour. Her boots left wet prints along the checkerboard tile as she stepped inside, shaking rain from her coat collar.

She’d only come back for the folder—an annotated chapter draft left behind during seminar—but she hadn’t anticipated the storm worsening. The walk across the courtyard had soaked her through. Her umbrella had flipped inside out three steps from the door. And then there had been the fall.

The front steps had gleamed slick and treacherous in the amber glow of the lamplight. She’d misjudged the angle of the last one, her heel slipping out from under her. Her balance faltered, and she lurched forward—hand shooting out instinctively to catch herself against the stone balustrade. It didn’t quite work. Her palm scraped along rough concrete, and her right ankle twisted beneath her.

She’d gasped, but not cried out.

Hermione Granger did not cry out.

She sat there for a moment, stunned and drenched, rain soaking through her skirt, trying to breathe through the flash of pain. Her hand throbbed. She curled her fingers experimentally and winced. Her ankle protested as she rose, slowly, carefully. The ache wasn't unbearable—but enough to make every step cautious. The kind of pain that bloomed worse later, when the adrenaline wore off.

Now, the corridors of the English Department were quiet, their usual bustle faded into the hush of evening. The faint hum of the ancient radiator system filled the silence with a low, almost-human breath. Every creaking floorboard echoed like a footstep that didn’t belong to her.

She limped toward the seminar room, her wet hair plastered to her temples, the fabric of her coat heavy and cold. She retrieved the folder from the long oak table with trembling fingers.

But it wasn’t the folder she was thinking about.

Her hand still stung. Her ankle, despite her efforts to downplay it, ached more with every step. She paused by the staircase, debating whether to risk the descent now or wait, rest a moment.

That was when she noticed it.

The faint line of gold on the floor ahead. Warm light, bleeding from the bottom edge of a door—steady, unlike the flickering fluorescents in the hallway. She knew that door.

Professor Snape’s office.

He was still here.

Of course he was. Always the last to leave. As though he preferred the university best when it was empty—when all the voices had gone quiet, and he alone remained in control of the silence.

She stood before the frosted glass pane inset in the tall, dark door. His name was etched in serif font beneath the departmental insignia. The golden light from within cast a long rectangle onto the corridor tile.

Her hand hovered. She wasn’t sure why she hesitated. Pride, perhaps. Or something more unnameable.

But the sharp throb in her ankle decided for her.

She knocked. Not too loud. Just enough for him to hear.

A pause, then: “Enter.”

She opened the door.

Snape was behind his desk when she entered, jacket slung over the back of his chair, sleeves rolled to the forearms with deliberate precision. He didn’t startle at the interruption. If anything, he seemed to have expected her—or perhaps he simply expected interruption from the world and had trained himself to tolerate it.

The room was dim, lit only by the amber glow of a small desk lamp, its light pooled on the cluttered surface between them. The overhead fluorescents were off, leaving the corners of the office in soft shadow. A faint thread of music filtered through the air—rich, low, and slightly worn from the crackling turntable on the sideboard. Ella Fitzgerald, if she wasn’t mistaken, her voice warm as velvet. A slow, longing ballad curled through the space like smoke.

Hermione’s eyes moved instinctively across the room—and stopped.

This wasn’t the Snape she saw in lectures, gliding between rows of desks in black wool, or challenging half-formed theses with a single glance. This was something else. The walls were lined with shelves, books stacked two-deep, some lying horizontally across the tops of others. The spines were worn to near-obscurity, faded gold titles barely legible under the low light. Some were in English, but others—French, German, Latin—required a second look. She spotted a volume of Rimbaud, something by Kristeva, and a slim, unassuming copy of Beckett’s letters.

On the windowsill, a porcelain teacup rested on a saucer—white with a cobalt edge, delicate as bone—beside a small, silver teapot. Steam no longer rose from it, but the scent lingered faintly in the air: strong black tea with something citrusy beneath. Bergamot, maybe.

An open book lay abandoned on the armchair opposite the desk. She leaned in slightly to read the title embossed on its cloth cover.

Rainer Maria Rilke – Briefe an einen jungen Dichter.

Her throat caught. It felt like she’d stepped behind a curtain—or through glass—into a space no student was ever meant to see. As though she had slipped sideways into a version of him that existed only here, in this amber-lit stillness. And despite herself, she felt the trespass.

He looked up, gaze steady, expression unreadable.

“Ms. Granger?”

She swallowed, suddenly conscious of the rain matting her hair to her temples, of the water dripping from her coat sleeves. “I fell,” she said. “On the front steps. It’s not serious, but I...” She lifted her left hand. “Thought you might have something for this.”

Her palm was raw and scraped, the skin torn in two shallow lines that had begun to puff. A faint smear of blood trailed across the curve of her thumb.

For a heartbeat, he didn’t move. Then, without a word, he stood, stepped past her, and shut the door with a soft click. The sound settled into the quiet like punctuation.

“Sit,” he said, gesturing toward the low chair near the edge of the desk. She obeyed, moving carefully, wincing as her right ankle reminded her of its displeasure.

Snape crossed to a cabinet she hadn’t noticed before, nestled between two overstuffed bookshelves that seemed to bow under the weight of countless volumes. The cabinet door was made of dark wood, its surface scratched and worn, like everything else in the room carried a history. He pulled open the door and retrieved a leather case—worn, hand-stitched, its edges softened by years of use. It looked like something from an apothecary’s shelf rather than a modern office, as if it had been passed down through generations. Hermione imagined it might smell faintly of dragon root or dittany, but when he unclasped the flap and unfolded it carefully on the desk, she saw its contents were surprisingly mundane: a brown glass bottle of antiseptic, a small tin of balm, gauze pads, tweezers wrapped meticulously in cloth, and neatly folded strips of bandage.

“You keep a first aid kit in your office?” Hermione asked, raising an eyebrow, half amused.

He didn’t glance up, methodically selecting a cotton pad and the antiseptic. “I live in a world of careless scholars and precariously balanced hardbacks,” he said dryly. “This is not the first injury within these walls.”

Hermione let out a soft laugh, unable to suppress it. “Spoken like a man with experience.”

At last, he looked up, his dark eyes briefly meeting hers. “Years of it.”

Without hesitation, he knelt in front of her chair—not so low as to seem subservient, but close enough that she could see the pale crescent-shaped scar on his right temple, usually hidden beneath his hair. His hands moved with calm precision, long fingers steady as he unscrewed the antiseptic bottle and poured a small amount onto the cotton.

“This will sting,” he warned.

“It already does,” Hermione replied quickly, bracing herself, but she didn’t flinch as he gently pressed the soaked cotton to her scraped palm.

The antiseptic’s cold bite made her inhale sharply, a sharp contrast to the warmth of his steady grip on her wrist. His fingers didn’t tighten, but they steadied her hand, lending a quiet reassurance.

He worked silently, methodical and careful—cleaning the wound, applying balm with soft dabs, laying the gauze, and then winding the bandage around her palm with practiced efficiency. His hands brushed against hers more than once, but always clinically, almost too fleeting to be noticed—yet Hermione was acutely aware of every contact. The way the cuff of his shirt brushed against her knee. The surprising warmth of his palm resting briefly against the back of her hand. The subtle scent of him—black tea, worn wool, and the faint trace of ink and old paper that clung to his skin.

When he finished, Snape carefully secured the bandage with a tiny pin, his fingers precise and deliberate as he fastened it just so. He didn’t rush; every movement seemed measured, almost reverent, as if treating the injury was a task of quiet importance. Slowly, he released her hand, his grip lingering just a moment longer than necessary before pulling away. “There,” he said softly, his voice low and calm in the stillness of the room. “Try not to split it open again.”

Hermione’s throat tightened, and she murmured, “Thank you.” The words came out quieter than she intended, barely above a whisper, as if afraid to break the fragile calm that had settled between them. She caught herself staring for a moment, watching how the bandage wrapped her palm and how the faintest crease of worry still lingered in his eyes. Then, as if noticing her gaze, he straightened and turned to return the leather case to its cabinet. The soft rustle of the leather against the wood was almost the only sound, aside from the faint, scratchy hiss of the record player.

The music shifted, the needle catching a new track on the turntable. Another Ella Fitzgerald ballad began to fill the room, slower this time—her voice smooth and melancholy, layered beneath by a low saxophone that curled through the air like smoke held in a delicate glass. Hermione’s eyes drifted around the office, taking in the stacks of worn books, the porcelain teacup on the windowsill, the dim amber glow from the desk lamp that softened every corner. It was a space transformed in this light—more intimate, more human, somehow.

Glancing back at him, she found herself surprised by a sudden question. “Your music,” she said slowly, “I didn’t expect jazz.”

He didn’t turn to meet her gaze but his voice carried a faint note of dry amusement. “Because you think I’m more the Wagnerian type?”

A warm flush crept up Hermione’s neck and tinged her cheeks. “Well… yes,” she admitted, feeling caught off guard by the easy familiarity of the exchange.

A flicker of something—amusement, perhaps, or a rare softness—crossed his face. “Fitzgerald, Holiday, Coltrane,” he said thoughtfully. “Complexity with soul.” His eyes finally lifted and met hers briefly, sharp and steady. “You assume all darkness is loud.”

Hermione had no answer. The statement hung between them, heavy and undeniable. She felt as though she’d been stripped bare in that moment—not by his words, but by the truth behind them. Nothing came to her lips, save for a quiet breath.

As he turned back toward the sideboard, his gaze dropped, following the line of her body until it settled on her ankle. “You’re favouring your right foot,” he observed with a clinical sharpness that betrayed no surprise.

Hermione hesitated, caught off guard by his perceptiveness. “I didn’t want to mention it,” she said softly, biting her lip. “It’s just a sprain.”

Snape’s dark eyes fixed on her. “Remove your boot.”

She blinked in disbelief. “Excuse me?”

His eyebrow rose with that unmistakable expression that brooked no argument—the subtle but unyielding command that left no room for refusal. “If you came to me for assistance, Ms. Granger, you should allow me to offer it properly.”

There was a long pause as she weighed her options, the quiet ticking of the clock almost unbearable in its persistence. Finally, she sighed and leaned forward carefully. Her boot was soaked through from the rain, the laces loose and muddied. She worked slowly to unlace them, mindful of the ache radiating from her ankle. Sliding off the boot, she revealed damp tights clinging to her skin, a faint run splitting the fabric across the arch of her foot. Gingerly, she rested her bare heel against the edge of the rug, trying not to flinch as the cool air touched the bruised skin.

Snape knelt before her again, this time his movements slower, more deliberate. His fingertips pressed gently against the tender flesh, rotating her ankle with practiced skill. The quiet strength in his hands was steadying, a stark contrast to the fragility she felt inside.

After a measured moment, he spoke. “Swelling, but no displacement. You’ll need to keep it elevated and apply ice if you can.”

“Noted,” Hermione replied, her voice low, as if speaking louder might shatter the delicate bubble around them.

Their eyes met then—closer than they had ever been before. The air between them shifted, charged with something unspoken, a fragile tension that neither wanted to name but both could feel. The moment stretched, weightless, suspended in the quiet glow of the office light.

Then, just as gently as it had come, the spell broke. He stood, stepping back and clearing the space between them.

“I assume you can make it home?” he asked, his voice returning to its usual steady, formal tone.

She nodded without hesitation. “I’ll manage.”

Without another word, he walked to the sideboard and poured steaming tea from the silver pot into the delicate porcelain cup. Without asking, he handed it to her. Hermione took it carefully, the warmth seeping into her fingers, chasing away the chill that the rain and pain had left behind.

“I won’t keep you,” she said after a pause.

He inclined his head slightly. “You rarely do.”

And yet she lingered. And he made no move to dismiss her.

The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. Instead, it felt full—pregnant with things neither dared to voice aloud.

Later, when she finally left—boot laced back on, folder tucked under her arm, teacup carefully returned to its saucer—Hermione stepped out into the wet night. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, the cold air biting gently at her skin. She moved with a dull ache in her ankle, a slow burn in her hand, and something altogether different in her chest.

As if the glass wall between them—the one she’d always felt was there—had thinned, just enough to let something fragile and real slip through.

Chapter Text

Hermione stared at the screen, her fingers frozen above the keyboard. She had meant to write Professor Snape, of course—always formal, always careful. But in the rush of the evening, with her thoughts scattered between the stack of research notes on her desk and the bruised ankle still throbbing from her stumble, her fingers had betrayed her. The email read:

Dear Severus,

Her heart jumped. The cursor blinked mockingly, as if daring her to send the message. She quickly deleted the name, replacing it with the proper Professor Snape. Then, uncertain, she reread the whole email: polite, precise, well-structured. No hint of the informal slip that had nearly escaped her.

She sighed, shook her head, and clicked send.

The next day, Hermione’s inbox pinged with a reply. She clicked it open, scanning for any sign that he had noticed the slip. But the email was formal, clipped, a little colder than usual:

Ms. Granger,

Your latest draft shows improvement in argument structure, though your citations remain inconsistent. I expect rigorous adherence to style guidelines in your next submission.

Regards,

Professor Snape

Hermione’s chest tightened. The usual undertone of his critiques—the subtle encouragement beneath the sharp edges—was absent. There was no trace of the rare warmth, no hint that he’d engaged with her ideas beyond the surface. Just cold professionalism.

She reread her own email from the night before. Had she been too familiar? Had addressing him by his first name—albeit accidentally—changed everything?

Throughout the day, the small irritations built up. Every glance he spared her in the seminar was sharper, his tone more clipped during their brief conversations. The carefully measured respect that had begun to soften between them now felt fragile, distant.

The seminar room in the corner of the English Department was already uncomfortably warm. The old radiator clattered faintly beneath the tall windows, which were fogged with condensation from the lingering dampness outside. The walls, once freshly painted, now wore layers of peeling beige, punctuated by faded posters of literary giants and critical theories from decades past.

Fifteen graduate students sat in the customary loose circle—an arrangement meant to flatten hierarchy, but which inevitably highlighted it instead. Scattered across laps and desks were battered copies of The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom, The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams. These texts lay open like challenge cards, spines creased, and pages marked with frantic underlining.

At the front stood Snape in a sharply tailored black blazer, sleeves rolled back to reveal slender forearms. His posture was rigid, almost statuesque, as he held a small notebook in one hand, its pages covered in dense notes. His eyes swept over the students with cool, expectant calculation.

The topic was the role of authorial intent in literary interpretation—a subject that divided the room and promised no easy consensus.

Nobody dared to speak first until Fiona, a keen-eyed doctoral candidate known for her sharp critiques, broke the silence.

“I don’t see how we can disregard the author’s intent entirely,” she said, voice steady but edged with frustration. “Barthes’s ‘death of the author’ feels more like a convenient dismissal. Surely understanding what the author meant—how they framed the text—gives us valuable context, not just some abstract freedom to interpret however we like.”

A few students nodded, but others looked sceptical. Hermione watched the dynamics with practiced attention, feeling the weight of Snape’s gaze resting on her.

He made no move to intervene.

After a moment, Hermione spoke, her voice quiet but firm. “Barthes’s argument is not about erasing the author’s work but about challenging the dominance of authorial authority over meaning. The text lives beyond the author’s intentions. Readers bring their own contexts, histories, and identities—these shape interpretation in ways the author could never predict.”

Fiona frowned. “But isn’t that risky? It can lead to readings that distort or ignore the text’s original purpose.”

Hermione shook her head slowly. “The ‘original purpose’ is often unknowable, even to the author. Intent is filtered through time, culture, and language. Limiting interpretation to that intention restricts the text’s vitality and its ability to resonate across different readers and eras.”

Langston, seated opposite Hermione, leaned forward, interjecting. “But don’t we risk fragmenting literature into subjective noise? Without authorial grounding, what prevents arbitrary or anachronistic interpretations?”

Hermione met his gaze, steady. “Interpretation isn’t anarchic. It’s an ongoing conversation—between text, reader, and context. It’s critical engagement, not license.”

The room hummed with tension. Snape’s eyes narrowed briefly, then softened, settling on Hermione.

He finally spoke, voice low and controlled, “Ms. Granger, your argument is precise and well-considered. Yet, I would remind you that any conversation benefits from a careful weighing of historical context alongside contemporary readings. The challenge is balance, not exclusion.”

Turning to Fiona, he added, “And Miss McKinley, I encourage you to reread Barthes with an openness to the productive ambiguity that interpretation can offer.”

Fiona’s confident expression faltered; Hermione noticed the subtle shift in the room’s energy.

The seminar resumed with renewed vigour, the debate now sharper and more engaged. Hermione kept her posture calm, but beneath her skin, the echo of Snape’s gaze was insistent and ambiguous—a silent question that unsettled her.

When the session ended, she gathered her notes—Barthes dog-eared and scribbled over—and stepped out into the grey drizzle outside, the cool air a balm against the flush of adrenaline and uncertainty that still lingered.

Hermione found herself overthinking every interaction, every word she wrote. Was she overstepping some invisible boundary? Was the respect she felt, the gratitude for his mentorship, mistaken for something else entirely? Was he reading her differently now?

Had she been foolish to hope that someone like him could see beyond the surface? Or worse, that she might be misreading his reserved gestures as kindness?

She spent a restless evening drafting replies she never sent, rehearsing apologies and explanations in her head. Her thoughts spiralled: Was it arrogance to expect kindness from him? Or was he simply intolerant of mistakes? Had she misunderstood his intentions all along?

The next week, the feedback on her work arrived again, terse and impersonal, void of the subtle nuances that had once challenged and encouraged her. Hermione sat with the pages spread before her, feeling the distance grow like a silent chasm.

That night, she opened the rare book he’d lent her—Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems—seeking the solace that poetry had offered before. But the words on the page seemed colder now, the lines between power and vulnerability tangled in a way that echoed the confusion twisting inside her.

Her fingers traced the poem he had singled out—the one about breaking rules, chasing the unknown. It was a landscape of uncertainty and invention, but also of isolation.

Hermione closed the book, her heart aching with a quiet question: Had she truly misread him? Or was it herself who was lost somewhere between words and intentions?

Chapter Text

Hermione first heard the whispers on a rain-soaked Tuesday, late in the afternoon, when the faculty lounge had settled into its usual hush. The space—lined with mismatched armchairs and outdated portraits—was typically deserted by this hour, abandoned in favour of quieter offices and earlier trains. But today, the room pulsed with a low murmur: the sound of weary professors lingering over cooling mugs of tea, post-lecture gossip, and end-of-day sighs.

She entered with the simple intention of refilling her teacup, her mind still half-occupied with a student’s flawed thesis draft and the growing mountain of essays waiting on her desk. The kettle hissed in the corner. The scent of burnt Earl Grey clung faintly to the air. She was halfway to the sideboard when she paused—stilled by a name.

“...you remember the fallout from that liaison? Between Severus and Marissa?”

The voice was low, but crisp. Male. One of the senior lecturers in History, perhaps. The reply came a moment later, feminine and just as sharp.

“Dreadful, really. Thought it would ruin his career.”

Hermione stood frozen, one hand tightening around the handle of her porcelain cup. She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The words came like ice water down the back of her neck—unexpected and uninvited.

“Still talk about it in hushed tones,” the woman continued, with a cluck of her tongue. “She was tenured, after all. Could have been a real scandal if she'd pushed it. But she resigned. Quietly. Conveniently.”

A sip of tea. The rustle of coat fabric. Then, softer, “They say it wasn’t just messy—it was humiliating. There was a disciplinary hearing. The department kept it internal.”

Hermione’s stomach tightened.

She hadn’t known.

Of course she hadn’t—Snape was always so reserved, so carefully distant, as though every part of his personal life had been boxed and buried beneath layers of intellectual rigor and cold professionalism. He spoke in clinical tones. Rarely joked. Offered compliments like surgical incisions—precise, infrequent, and unforgettable. And yet, here was this ghost from his past, spoken of with the kind of venom reserved for old, irreparable wounds.

A secret, now uncoiled and breathing just beneath the surface of his guarded silence.

She stepped back into the hallway before they could notice her, her tea forgotten, her pulse loud in her ears.

The rest of the afternoon unfolded in fragments. Lecture notes blurred. Conversations passed through her as if underwater. That single overheard moment—Severus and Marissa, scandal, ruin—looped over itself in her thoughts, pairing itself with memories she’d otherwise ignored: his sidelong glances when he thought she wasn’t looking. The rare softening of his voice when he offered guidance. The lingering pauses between words, as though something unspoken hovered just behind his tongue.

It wasn’t just the idea of the affair. It was the implication—of him with someone else. Of someone else knowing him intimately. Of another woman having seen what Hermione was only beginning to glimpse beneath his carefully constructed armour.

Later, at home, she sat at her desk long after dark, her laptop casting a pale glow across the room as she typed through faculty records and old departmental bulletins. The name surfaced easily.

Marissa Caldwell.

Professor of Renaissance Literature. Sharp, beautiful in that unbothered way that only came with tenure and indifference. Known for her commanding lectures and caustic humour. The departmental records didn’t mention the affair—but they didn’t need to. The timeline was clear. Her sudden resignation. The gap it left. The awkward phrasing in the archived announcement that referred to her “gracious decision to step down for personal reasons.”

The rumours had been right.

Hermione closed the laptop, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling.

It doesn’t change anything, she told herself. It was years ago. They’re colleagues. Professionals. It’s none of your business.

But the feeling—low, slow, and irrational—lingered. Something like jealousy, yes. But also unease. Like discovering a fault line running beneath a landscape she had thought she understood. And now she couldn’t stop thinking of it. Of her. Of them.

The next time Hermione saw Snape was during his usual late office hours. The rain tapped softly against the windows as she stepped into his dimly lit study, clutching a sheaf of papers. He looked up from the desk, eyes dark and unreadable, but the faintest crease appeared between his brows when he noticed her hesitation.

“Ms. Granger,” he said, voice low. “You seem... distracted.”

She swallowed, the words lodged in her throat. Part of her wanted to keep the silence, to pretend she hadn’t overheard. But the truth weighed heavier.

“May I be honest?” she said finally.

He inclined his head. “Of course.”

“I heard about your... past with Professor Caldwell,” she admitted, voice quiet. “The rumours. The affair.”

For a moment, Snape’s expression didn’t change. Then something subtle flickered in his eyes—an almost imperceptible shadow of regret.

“Rumours are rarely kind,” he said. “And often incomplete.”

Hermione took a step closer, emboldened. “It doesn’t change how I feel about our work, or the respect I have for you.”

He studied her face then, as if weighing whether to retreat behind his usual walls or not.

“It was a different time,” he said quietly. “A mistake, if you want it called that. But mistakes have consequences that linger longer than we intend.”

A long, quiet moment stretched between them, soft and taut as thread drawn tight. The rain outside tapped steadily at the windows, a muted rhythm beneath the hush in the room.

Hermione watched him, studied the faint tension around his mouth, the careful stillness of his hands. Snape rarely allowed even a flicker of vulnerability to surface—everything in him was composed, deliberate. But now, in that flickering lamplight, there was something more fragile behind the curtain. A trace of old wounds not yet fully scabbed over.

He hadn’t looked away.

“I wasn’t trying to pry,” she said softly. “It just… caught me off guard.”

“I imagine it did.” His voice was quieter now, lower. “Marissa and I were ill-suited, even from the beginning. We mistook shared intellect for compatibility. It was flattering, at first. Dangerous, second.”

He stood then, walking slowly to the narrow window, one hand in his trouser pocket, the other trailing along the back of a chair as he passed. Hermione’s eyes followed him, heart thudding too loudly in her chest. He didn’t pace, didn’t fidget—just stood with the rain-slicked night at his back, the amber light from his desk lamp casting long shadows across the lines of his face.

“She was brilliant. Still is. But our ambitions were at odds. We needed different things.” His eyes flicked to the windowpane, as though watching some invisible past take shape in the fogged glass. “We hurt each other. Publicly. The department never quite forgave us for the spectacle.”

Hermione felt something tighten in her throat. She didn’t like picturing him that way—exposed, judged, torn open before a tribunal of his peers. She didn’t like imagining another woman seeing the sides of him Hermione had only just begun to understand.

She spoke before she could stop herself.

“Did you love her?”

That drew his gaze back to her. His expression was unreadable at first—then slowly, something flickered across it. Not anger. Not mockery. Just... honesty.

“No,” he said.  

Hermione let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. The ache behind her ribs softened, but it didn’t vanish.

There was a kind of silence then that only came after truth. Not awkward. Not forced. Just heavy with things that hadn’t been said before—and things that perhaps didn’t need to be.

“You’re jealous,” he said suddenly.

Her head snapped up. “I—what?”

He turned back toward her fully, his expression sharper now, though not unkind. “I said you’re jealous.”

“That’s absurd,” she muttered, but she could feel the heat crawling up her neck.

“It isn’t.” He walked past the desk, pausing just a few feet from her. “You’ve always prided yourself on being rational. But you feel it anyway. The injustice of knowing someone else had access to a version of me you’ve only just begun to discover.”

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He wasn’t wrong.

“You can’t know that,” she said finally, voice barely above a whisper.

His gaze didn’t waver. “But I do.”

Hermione’s fingers curled around the edge of her notebook, knuckles white.

“Maybe I am jealous,” she said, lifting her chin. “But I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t plan to—” She stopped herself. The word lodged in her throat like a splinter. Feel.

He didn’t press her. Instead, he moved to sit on the edge of the desk, folding his hands together in his lap.

“I don’t enjoy being dissected, Granger,” he said, and though his tone was cooler now, the honesty still pulsed beneath it. “Least of all by rumour. But I’d rather you hear it from me than invent some narrative out of second-hand scraps.”

Hermione nodded, unsure whether to thank him or simply remain silent. She settled for neither.

“She must’ve seen something in you,” she said quietly. “That’s not a criticism. Just... a fact.”

He exhaled through his nose, almost a scoff. “She saw a challenge. And I mistook that for intimacy. I was flattered that someone like her was interested. That someone could look past the... prickly exterior.”

Hermione’s lips parted, a protest rising unbidden. “You’re not just—”

“Difficult? Bitter? Cold?” His mouth curved in a crooked half-smile, more tired than amused. “Please, miss Granger. I’ve been called worse by better.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” she snapped.

“Then what were you going to say?”

“That you’re not just your defences,” she said, stepping forward. Her voice steadied, even as her heart skittered in her chest. “You’re... careful. Guarded. For good reason. But you’re also brilliant. And precise. And—when you choose to be—capable of extraordinary clarity.”

His eyes locked onto hers. “That sounds dangerously like admiration.”

“It is,” she said, almost too quietly.

A pause. The kind that stretched, then bent, then finally broke under its own weight.

“I shouldn’t let you say these things,” he murmured. “It complicates everything.”

“You’re my advisee,” he said at last, his voice a shade rougher than before. Not cold. But strained. “And I am responsible for your academic future.”

“I know,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but steady. “I’m not naïve.”

“I never said you were.” His eyes darkened. “But I’ve already made this mistake once. And it ended with humiliation. For her. For me. You don’t know what the fallout would look like—not for someone in your position. Not when you’ve worked this hard.”

Chapter Text

The November air had turned damp and metallic, the kind of cold that didn’t bite but seeped—crawling through wool and skin, curling around joints, embedding itself in bones. A thin mist clung low to the cobblestones of Cambridge, blurring the outlines of the ancient buildings until they looked less like structures and more like memories, half-faded and reluctant to return. The library stood at the heart of it all—an old, brooding monolith—its façade cloaked in ivy, its mullioned windows glowing faintly behind centuries of grime and condensation. It was a place of reverence and silence, a cathedral of thought where words were sacraments and time moved according to the laws of scholarship rather than the outside world.

Within that hallowed stillness, deep in the restricted section where the general student body rarely ventured, the shelves stood like sentinels—tall, immovable, their wooden frames worn smooth by the ghost-trace of countless hands. The air here was cooler, drier, and carried the distinct aroma of aging paper, beeswax, and old ink—the scent of preservation. Shadows pooled in the corners, where sconce lamps failed to reach, and the silence was not absence but density, as if sound itself were unwelcome.

Hermione had no pressing academic reason to be there that evening, at least not one she would have written down. Her access had already been granted on merit and reputation, and no one would question her presence—least of all her advisor. But that wasn’t why she’d come.

She told herself it was coincidence.

She didn’t believe herself.

The heavy door gave a reluctant groan as she pushed it open, the hinges voicing their complaint like something disturbed from a long sleep. Cold lamplight spilled onto the stone floor in a rectangular shaft, cutting through the darkness like a scalpel, and there at the far end of the aisle—half-shadow, half-form—stood Severus Snape. He hadn’t turned at the sound of her entrance. He didn’t need to.

“If you’re going to hover in the doorway like a second-rate ghost,” he said, his voice dry and surgically precise, “at least close the door behind you.”

The reprimand was casual, but it clipped through the quiet with the same ease as a scalpel through silk. Hermione swallowed the impulse to snap something back. She shut the door with measured quiet, letting it latch into place with a low click.

He was standing at one of the deep oak reading tables, still in his long black coat, its hem brushing the floor like a shadow untethered from its source. A green-shaded banker’s lamp cast its narrow pool of light directly onto the ancient folio before him, throwing the rest of the room into half-darkness. In that small radius of illumination, his profile was thrown into sharp relief—the aquiline nose, the furrowed brow, the severe mouth, all made more angular by the shifting play of shadow and lamplight. He looked like a figure painted in chiaroscuro: carved from ink and bone.

“You’re working with the Dolabella folio?” Hermione asked, her voice kept low out of habit, reverence, or perhaps the need to soften her presence.

“I am,” he replied curtly, eyes still on the manuscript. “Though I doubt it has anything useful for your dissertation, unless you’ve developed a sudden and ill-advised interest in pre-Baconian cipher theory.”

“I’m interested in its symbolic logic system,” she said, drawing nearer, cautious but not hesitant. “And its references to Paracelsian methods.”

Snape’s mouth twitched at the edge—not quite a smile, certainly not fondness. Perhaps amusement. Perhaps disdain. With him, the difference was often academic.

“Everyone is interested in Paracelsus these days,” he said, turning a brittle page with careful precision. “Fashionable mysticism parading as methodology. A contagious intellectual affectation, like post-structuralism or enthusiasm for Wittgenstein.”

She stepped beside him now, close enough to catch the subtle, astringent scent of his soap—cedar and clove, understated, exacting. “You don’t believe there’s anything useful in symbolic recursion?”

“I believe,” he said, finally glancing up at her, “that there’s a difference between usefulness and academic vanity. Most doctoral candidates haven’t yet learned to distinguish one from the other.”

The comment was surgical in tone, sharpened not to wound but to challenge. She knew this pattern. He taught through friction, through the kind of pressure that could either polish or shatter depending on the recipient’s mettle. But Hermione had never flinched from him. Not as a girl at Hogwarts. Not now.

“I suppose that’s why I keep showing you drafts,” she said, holding his gaze.

Snape’s expression didn’t shift. “Hm.”

She leaned in further, pretending to study the open page. Her fingers came to rest lightly on the edge of the table, near his. A small, unconscious gesture. Or so she told herself.

Then: contact.

Their hands brushed—just the backs of fingers, the briefest collision of skin—and the atmosphere changed instantly. It wasn’t a jolt, but a stilling, like the sudden hush before thunder. Snape’s entire posture altered, not with a start, but with a tightening, as though some inner wire had drawn taut. He didn’t move away, but he didn’t continue turning pages either. He simply... paused.

So did she.

The silence between them grew denser, no longer comfortable or routine. It pressed in around them like the thickened air before a storm, filled with unspoken things. Her hand didn’t move. Neither did his. The lamp flickered faintly overhead.

When he spoke again, his voice was low and laced with quiet steel. “Do be careful, Miss Granger. This manuscript is four centuries old and less tolerant of mishandling than I am.”

She withdrew her hand slowly, not out of guilt, but acknowledgment. “Understood.”

Neither of them moved for a moment, and yet the entire room seemed to shift—ever so slightly. The books, the shadows, the air itself. Hermione felt something tight inside her chest, not quite fear, not quite excitement. Something braced.

She could feel it in the space between them: the presence of something invisible yet unmistakable, pushed so far down it distorted everything around it. Not affection, not exactly. Not desire, not clearly. Just... gravity.

“I’ve noticed,” Hermione said quietly, her voice soft but not tentative. “That you’ve been avoiding our one-on-one meetings.”

The words seemed to fall into the space between them like a stone into still water—no splash, only the deepening of silence, a subtle shift in the air.

Across the table, Snape did not immediately respond. He remained focused on the manuscript, one finger trailing just beneath a line of faded Latin script as if her voice had been little more than the hum of distant traffic. Then, without looking up, he replied, tone clipped and glacial.

“I’ve been allocating my time according to relevance. Your last submission did not warrant further commentary.”

A blunt cut. Impersonal. Academic. The kind of dismissal designed not just to correct, but to close the door.

But Hermione wasn’t deterred. Her arms folded slowly across her chest—not in defiance, exactly, but with the steady posture of someone deciding, finally, not to keep pretending she didn’t care.

“That isn’t what I meant,” she said.

A pause.

“I know.”

That reply—flat and unadorned—landed with more weight than any defence or denial could have. It acknowledged everything without giving anything. And in that economy of words, she felt the familiar rhythm of him: precise, evasive, armed with restraint.

She studied him closely. His posture was immaculate, as always—shoulders drawn back, spine straight, hands composed even as they turned another page of the ancient manuscript with surgical delicacy. The muscles in his jaw were set, though, and the way he blinked—once, slowly, deliberately—betrayed a flicker of irritation. Or anticipation.

“So we’re playing this game, then,” she said, her tone now edged, no longer soft.

Snape turned another page with the slow, measured control of someone refusing to acknowledge the rising heat in the room. The lamp beside him buzzed faintly, casting both of them in a half-gold glow that seemed to separate them from the rest of the library—an island of unresolved tension adrift in the dark.

“What game would that be?” he asked.

“The one where you pretend not to notice,” she said, stepping forward, each syllable deliberate, “and I pretend not to care.”

That earned a response—not a smile, not even a smirk, but a sound low in his throat. It wasn’t a laugh, exactly, but it bore the shape of one—a dry, mirthless exhalation that suggested amusement he did not permit himself to fully feel.

“You presume a great deal,” he said at last, his voice brushed with acid. “Cambridge must be very proud.”

Hermione lifted her chin slightly. “I’m not your student,” she said. “Not technically.”

“No,” he conceded, looking back at the manuscript. “But you are still my advisee. Which means your work, your reputation, and your judgment remain—regrettably—my concern.”

The emphasis on the final phrase was not accidental. Each word carried a weight that made its meaning unmistakable. He was drawing a line—not with anger, but with deliberate, almost clinical distance.

Hermione took another step forward, closing the gap between them until only a sliver of desk and two centuries of restraint separated them.

“And if that’s not all that concerns you?”

Snape looked up then—fully, directly. His eyes, always dark and unreadable, had a depth to them tonight that unsettled her more than any reprimand. They were calm, yes, but there was something moving behind them. A warning. A door just beginning to shut.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said.

His tone was cool, but it did not dismiss. It cautioned.

“I’m not,” she said, her voice lower now, almost inaudible in the cavernous stillness of the library. “I know what I’m saying.”

“No,” he said, more sharply now. “You don’t. You are being foolish. And worse, you’re being reckless. You don’t understand what this would look like, should anyone—”

“Then explain it to me,” she snapped. The words cracked out of her before she could soften them, propelled by the frustration that had been building over weeks of evasion and silence and careful distance masquerading as professionalism.

The effect was immediate. The air seemed to still around them.

He closed the manuscript with slow finality, the sound of parchment folding against wood impossibly loud in the quiet. It was not the kind of closing that invited a return. It was an end. A border being reasserted.

“You don’t want honesty from me, Miss Granger,” he said after a long moment. His voice had gone quiet—not soft, but dangerous. Like a blade sheathed just beneath the surface. “You want confession. You want a crack in the wall so you can squeeze yourself through and pretend you weren’t complicit in the damage.”

Her cheeks flushed—not entirely from shame. Anger was there too, sharp and unyielding. But she didn’t step back. Didn’t look away.

“Maybe I want something real,” she said, almost as a dare.

Snape stared at her for several seconds. His silence was not absence—it was scrutiny. And when he repeated the word, it came out like a curse.

“Real,” he said, the syllable tasting bitter. “You want real from a man you barely know.”

“I know more than you think,” she answered, voice firm despite the heat in her face.

“No,” he said, and this time there was steel behind the word. “You know only what I’ve allowed. And that illusion—charming as it may be—ends here.”

He stepped back then, breaking whatever fragile magnetic pull had formed between them. His movements were swift, not hurried but efficient, as he gathered his notes and tucked them into the satchel slung over his shoulder. The lines of his body were tight with restraint—every motion purposeful, practiced, and brimming with tension coiled too tightly to be safe.

Hermione watched, heart thudding in her chest like an accusation.

As he reached the door, she said, almost without meaning to, “So that’s it, then?”

He paused. Just long enough to let the question hover. Just long enough to make her hope.

Then, with his back still to her, he said, “It was never anything.”

A beat.

“Which is precisely why it can stay that way.”

And then he was gone—swallowed by the dark corridor beyond the reading room, his black coat dissolving into shadow, the sound of his footsteps swallowed by thick stone and centuries of silence. He left behind nothing but the faint scent of paper, the impression of something unspoken, and the echo of absence.

Hermione remained alone, the silence stretching out around her like a second skin. Her fingers moved, almost absently, to the spot on the table where their hands had once brushed. The wood was cold.

The manuscript lay forgotten, its pages stilled, irrelevant.

She wasn’t sure what she felt.

Only that it wasn’t nothing.

Not even close.

Chapter Text

The memo arrived with no fanfare—just an unassuming envelope slipped under her office door, its edges still crisp from campus stationery stock. No handwriting. No personal touch. Just a typed label in cool black ink:

Granger, H. – Private / Academic Advisement

Hermione stared at it on the floor for longer than she’d care to admit. A pale shaft of morning light from the narrow window illuminated its clean white surface, like some institutional ghost come to knock on her ribs.

When she finally opened it, the air inside felt colder.

Miss Granger,

Following recent interdepartmental commentary regarding the nature of certain supervisory relationships, I find it prudent to reinforce clear professional boundaries between doctoral advisees and faculty. While your academic output remains satisfactory, I am advising all future communication be limited to formal channels: scheduled meetings during office hours, academic correspondence only via your institutional account, and no unsanctioned access to restricted archives without department sign-off.

This measure is preventative, not punitive. I trust you understand the necessity of preserving the integrity of our work and the perception thereof.

Professor S. Snape, PhD
Fellow, Department of Literary Theory
Cambridge

No salutation. No closure. Just cold scaffolding made of passive language and ink. Hermione folded the letter once, then unfolded it. Read it again. The burn in her face crept down into her chest.

Preventative.

Perception.

Integrity.

She knew precisely what had happened.

It wouldn’t have been an outright accusation—nothing so vulgar or confrontational. No one at Cambridge wielded knives that way. Here, the blade was velvet-lined, slipped between ribs with a smile and a raised glass of sherry.

No, it would have been delivered in passing. Likely at a wine-soaked departmental luncheon or a book launch hosted in some cramped, oak-panelled salon. Somewhere the port flowed too freely and the conversation turned—inevitably—to whispers dressed as witticisms. Someone—probably one of the greying fossils who hadn’t published anything relevant since Thatcher’s second term—would have leaned a fraction too close to a colleague and offered it up like gossip disguised as insight:

“Well, there’s certainly a… lively rapport between Miss Granger and Professor Snape, wouldn’t you say?”

A little smirk. A rustle of polite laughter. The performance of collegiality masking the rot underneath.

And just like that, the entire scaffolding of her work—months of research, hundreds of annotated pages, late-night archive requests, trenchant analyses of hermeneutic recursion in seventeenth-century marginalia—had been reframed.

Not as achievement.

Not as discipline.

But as proximity.

Her intellectual rigor became flirtation. Her questions during office hours—probing, complex, eager—now seemed too frequent, too familiar. Her presence in the restricted archives with him, once quiet proof of academic ambition, was now fodder for insinuation. As if she had slipped through the cracks not by excellence, but by favour.

They had taken her mind and recast it as choreography. A performance. Her sharpness had become seduction in the eyes of men who wouldn’t recognize theoretical elegance if it hit them in the face with a hardbound edition of Foucault’s Pendulum.

And of course it was Snape. The man who wore inscrutability like a coat. Who had tenure carved into his bones and a reputation so barbed no one dared touch it directly. He was brilliant. Difficult. And deeply unapproachable. Which only made it worse.

The idea of her—young, female, academic—finding some flicker of connection with him? Unpalatable. Not because it couldn’t be true, but because if it were, it threatened the unspoken rules of their world. It broke the illusion that power and gender and scholarship could coexist without friction.

She could almost hear it:

“She’s always been precocious, that one.”

“Snape’s always preferred intensity to obedience—perhaps too much so.”

“Brilliant girl. But she’s ambitious. You know how they are.”

They didn’t need evidence. Just a tone of voice. A well-timed glance. A sigh.

And Snape, in his usual fashion, had responded the only way he knew how: swift withdrawal. Formal distance. He’d doused the entire matter in cold ink and bureaucracy, as if to say nothing happened, and it never could, because now there are rules. Pre-emptive severance under the guise of professional concern.

He hadn’t even given her the dignity of a conversation.

Hermione swallowed hard, her nails pressing into the crease of the letter still open on her desk. It was all there between the lines: the fear, the need for containment, the ugly calculus of reputation. She’d spent so long playing by their rules, proving herself twice over in every seminar, in every footnote, only to discover that the mere suggestion of closeness could undo it all.

Not her work. Just her proximity to his.

And perhaps worse—he had let them define it for him.

She sat heavily at her desk, fingers pressed to her temples. The rustle of leaves outside her window was loud in the absence of everything else.

Snape hadn’t even spoken to her first. He hadn’t so much as hinted at concern in their last meeting. If anything, he’d been... taut, yes, but quietly present. He’d lingered too long by the window when she’d made some offhand remark about de Man’s metaphors. He hadn’t looked at her when she left.

But this? This was bloodless. Surgical.

And infuriating.

She stood, too abruptly. Her chair skidded against the wooden floor. She grabbed the letter, crumpled it into her fist, then smoothed it out again like some futile spell against what it really meant.

He had chosen to insulate himself. To protect his reputation with the full artillery of bureaucratic language and stiff margins. Not once had he asked her what she had heard. Not once had he offered solidarity, or caution, or even a shred of trust.

And still… still she could hear his voice in the way the letter avoided saying anything directly.

To protect both your reputation and mine...

A line dressed in professionalism, but beneath it? That was him. That was Snape. Sharp. Wary. And defensive in the way men became when the world had taught them that proximity could destroy a career—but the woman involved would recover faster. Would be pitied, not punished.

Her eyes burned.

She should never have let the space between them blur.

She pulled up the departmental website with clipped efficiency, her fingers striking the keys with more force than necessary. The screen glowed with institutional formality: crests, serif fonts, an excess of Latin. At the top of the navigation bar—FACULTY & ADVISEMENT—a drop-down menu appeared. She clicked through too fast, as if speed would soften the enormity of what she was contemplating.

There, listed neatly under Literary Theory – Senior Faculty, was Dr. Miriam Lachlan.

Hermione stared at the name like it might blink back.

Lachlan was legend.

Brutally incisive. Unflinchingly rigorous. A scholar who once published a peer-reviewed takedown of her own doctoral advisor’s legacy, complete with annotated archival corrections and a final footnote that read: “Sentimentality is not revision.”

She’d heard stories—everyone had. Lachlan had allegedly reduced a visiting lecturer to tears using only two references: Middlemarch and Wittgenstein. She did not suffer fools, nor flatter brilliance. Her mentorship was an apprenticeship in fire: ruthless, exacting, but fair.

Fairness. That was what Hermione wanted now, above all else. Not gentleness. Not protection. Just the clean edge of merit without speculation curled behind it.

She moved her cursor toward the "Request Advisement Change" form, the departmental grey box waiting patiently in the lower corner. It was clinical in its brevity:

Please indicate your current advisor, your desired advisor, and a short rationale for the request. Requests will be reviewed by the Postgraduate Advisory Board within five working days.

Hermione's cursor hovered. Just hovered.

She knew what clicking that button would mean. Transfers were rare, especially mid-year. They disrupted research continuity, created political ripples. Cambridge prized tradition, and switching from one senior fellow to another—particularly from Severus Snape, whose tenure was soaked in both accolades and infamy—would be read as a signal.

There would be questions. Not aloud, not in emails. But in glances. In the frosty politeness of departmental meetings. In the subtle exclusions from editorial projects and speaking invitations. She’d feel it in the shift of air in the faculty lounge, in the length of time it took for people to return her emails.

It would not be easy.

But it would be hers. Her choice. Her action. A small act of reclamation in a place that so often preferred women silent, or grateful, or both.

Her eyes flicked up, almost involuntarily, to the second shelf of her bookcase. Left-hand side. A worn spine caught the lamplight: Language, Memory, and the Broken Symbol.

Snape’s first major monograph. Out of print now. Dense, mercilessly intelligent, scathing in its dissection of post-structural melancholia. She knew it cover to cover. Knew where the printing errors were in the third edition. Knew how the French marginalia in the copy he gave her veered from formal critique into something strangely personal.

And then there were her own drafts—marked not just in red, but in pauses. In underlines that didn’t slash, but circled. In tiny hesitations between comments, as if some part of him resisted saying too much. Or, perhaps, saying it plainly.

She told herself she wasn’t sentimental. That it was about professional sabotage, not personal disappointment.

But Hermione Granger had not gotten this far by lying to herself.

This wasn’t just about feelings. It wasn’t even primarily about him.

It was about who was allowed proximity. Who could sit in an office and challenge him without someone in the hallway reducing it to rapport. Who could publish alongside him without a raised eyebrow. Who could speak boldly without being recast as strategic or precocious or worse—naïve.

This was about power. Who got to wield it cleanly. Who had to bleed for it first.

She reached for the letter again—Snape’s formal warning, cloaked in institutional language. It was dry. Impersonal. Too clean to be honest. She folded it once more, not out of anger this time, but out of resolve. The crease was sharp and even. Precise. She set it gently beside her keyboard, aligned exactly with the edge.

If he wanted distance, she would give him distance.

If he wanted silence, she could serve it colder than he ever had.

But she would not shrink. She would not swallow the insult and thank him for the water.

He had drawn a line and stepped behind it like a coward.

Hermione Granger was preparing her response—and it would not be in ink.

It would be in brilliance. In theory, in argument, in the thunderous silence of someone who refused to be handled.

Chapter Text

The first snowfall came unexpectedly, soft and relentless, blanketing Cambridge in a quiet white hush that seemed almost reverent. Winter break had descended like a pause in time — the university emptied of its usual throng, corridors left to echo footsteps and distant drafts.

Hermione packed her bags with the careful precision of someone closing a chapter—not just of her academic year, but of a lingering tension she was desperate to leave behind. Her dissertation notes were meticulously arranged: dog-eared notebooks with color-coded tabs, printouts annotated with her neat, precise handwriting, and a small folder containing articles she’d scavenged from obscure journals. Each item was stacked like a miniature barricade against distraction, a fortress of focus to carry with her across the channel.

The conference was held in Geneva — the International Symposium on Contemporary Literary Theory, hosted at the Palais des Nations. It was a rare honour, the kind of event where the sharpest minds in the field gathered not only to present papers but to wrestle with new ideas that could shift the intellectual landscape. For Hermione, this was an opportunity to step out from the cloistered shadows of Cambridge’s ancient stone walls and into a wider, more exacting arena. The attendees were a mix of seasoned professors, rising stars from universities worldwide, and a smattering of publishers and critics whose opinions could make or break academic careers.

She was slated to present her thesis draft during a mid-morning session—a panel focused on “Symbolism and Semiotics in Postmodern Texts.” It was a perfect fit for her work, and she had spent weeks rehearsing how to distil her dense, recursive arguments into something clear and compelling for a room full of experts. The conference promised not only exposure but critical feedback, connections that might help her future career, and the validation that her research deserved serious consideration beyond her familiar academic circle.

The morning before her departure, as dawn crept pale and grey through her window, Hermione sat at her desk, double-checking her presentation slides. Her laptop chimed softly — the inbox flickered. A new email.

One unread message. From Severus Snape.

She hesitated, fingers hovering. The subject line was brusque, the tone unmistakably clipped.

Re: Dissertation progress

Miss Granger,

I trust your travels will be productive. Your last submission was adequate, though it left several points insufficiently addressed. I expect a revised draft upon your return.

Regards,

Severus Snape

She read it twice. The formality was a thin veil; beneath it, a current of something unsaid — restraint, irritation, a careful boundary maintained. No warmth. No personal sign-off. Yet the very fact of the email unsettled her more than any heated argument ever could.

She replied, concise and measured:

Professor Snape,

Thank you for your note. I will address your comments and submit the revision in due course.

Best regards,

Hermione Granger

No flourish, no invitation for further discourse. Just words dressed in armour.

And then, silence.

The space between their emails stretched wide and cold, as vast and empty as the snowfields beyond her hotel window.

But silence, Hermione found, was not empty. It pressed into her dreams like a weight she couldn’t shrug off, filling the spaces between thoughts with a quiet insistence. That night, as she lay in the unfamiliar hotel room halfway across the continent, the boundary between memory and longing blurred until they were indistinguishable.

In her dream, she was back in the restricted section of the Cambridge library. The familiar scent of old vellum and dust hung thick in the air, mingling with the faint metallic tang of the November mist outside. The green-shaded lamp cast pools of muted light across the polished wood table, illuminating the fragile manuscript spread before them. The pages whispered secrets only they could hear.

His presence was there, taut and restrained as ever, but something different flickered in his eyes — less cold, less guarded, and yet infinitely more intense. His voice wove through the stillness, low and measured, neither warm nor hostile, but threaded with an unspoken tension that made her skin prickle.

Their hands met briefly over the ancient parchment — a feather-light touch that sent a ripple through the air, as if the manuscript itself held its breath. She could feel the roughness of his sleeve against her fingertips, the deliberate stillness in his movements. His gaze bore into hers, dark and unreadable, holding something fierce beneath the surface — a vulnerability he never allowed in daylight, but which now shimmered like a fragile glass thread, dangerously thin and trembling.

The silence between them was thick, louder than any words they might have exchanged. In that moment, the boundaries of advisor and student, professional and personal, blurred into something fragile and unnameable.

Then, as the dream began to dissolve, the lamplight flickered and the library walls seemed to recede into shadow. His eyes remained locked on hers, a question hanging unanswered in the quiet.

She woke with a start, the echo of his presence lingering in the chill air of the unfamiliar hotel room. Her heart hammered in the stillness, the quiet outside pressed close, and for a long moment, she lay frozen — caught between the memory of the dream and the reality of the distance between them.

Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, Severus Snape sat alone in his study. The manuscript he’d been circling for weeks lay closed beside him, but his thoughts had drifted elsewhere — back to Hermione’s thesis, that sprawling inquiry into symbolic recursion and linguistic fractures.

The questions she’d raised gnawed at him. Her insight had sparked something unexpected — a flicker of something he hadn’t permitted himself in years: curiosity mingled with an unspoken respect.

The study was dimly lit by the pale glow of a desk lamp, casting long, angular shadows over piles of books and half-filled notebooks. Severus Snape sat rigidly, a fountain pen poised between his fingers, staring down the blank page before him.

This was unusual for Snape—not just the time spent writing, but the subject. His latest paper draft drew directly from the ideas Hermione had laid out in her dissertation proposal, a probing analysis of symbolic recursion in postmodern texts. Normally, he kept his distance from such speculative theories, preferring the certainty of structuralism and classical linguistics. But Hermione’s work had unsettled something deep within him.

Her thesis argued that meaning was not fixed or hierarchical but recursive—a constant loop of signifiers echoing within each other, fracturing and reforming the text’s identity. She had used examples from Renaissance literature, invoking Paracelsian symbolism as a metaphor for intellectual alchemy. At first, Snape had dismissed it as a clever but ultimately flawed attempt to merge mysticism with literary theory.

But the more he read and re-read her drafts, the more her argument demanded attention. It challenged the very foundation of his own scholarship, forcing him to reconsider the rigidity of his interpretations.

He found himself sketching new frameworks—mapping how recursive symbolism could reveal hidden dialogues within fragmented texts, how broken language might not signify failure but a deliberate process of meaning construction. This paper would argue for a dynamic theory of literary meaning, one that embraced ambiguity and instability as fertile ground for interpretation rather than flaws to be corrected.

His pen moved with unusual fluidity, each sentence crafted with precision yet tinged with a faint undercurrent of reluctant admiration. The paper was as much a dialogue with Hermione’s intellect as it was an academic argument.

Hours passed unnoticed as he laboured over footnotes and citations, weaving her ideas into his own distinctive, rigorous voice. When at last he leaned back, the page before him bore the marks of a synthesis—cold, exacting, but infused with an unexpected spark of innovation.

Chapter Text

Hermione’s flight touched down earlier than expected, the dull hum of the plane’s engines fading as she stepped into the cool, familiar air of Cambridge. The city was cloaked in the muted greys of late afternoon, fog curling around spires and cobblestones like a restless ghost. Her heart carried a restless weight—days away from home, from the rarefied atmosphere of the university, and, more quietly, from him.

She’d intended to savour the final days of her winter break, to gather her thoughts and plan her next steps with a clarity that had eluded her while the semester churned on.  Yet she crossed the quad toward her department’s building while she told herself she needed to review her notes, prepare for the next term. But beneath that practical veneer was a restless urgency she couldn’t quite name.

The department was quieter than usual when Hermione returned—a calm lull settled over the sprawling halls between terms, a temporary stillness before the storm of lectures, seminars, and deadlines would once again demand everyone’s attention. The usual clatter of footsteps and hushed conversations had thinned, leaving only the faint hum of heating and distant muffled voices echoing down the corridors. Hermione moved through this softened atmosphere, the familiar creak of her shoes against the polished stone floor grounding her in the routine she’d almost missed.

She slipped quietly into her office, the small space still holding the traces of late nights spent wrestling with dense theory and endless drafts. A cluster of journals lay scattered across her desk, some with bent spines and dog-eared pages, others marked by hastily scribbled notes in her meticulous handwriting. Half-empty coffee cups lingered, cooling relics of midnight study sessions. Her laptop balanced precariously atop a teetering stack of reference books, the blue glow of its screen casting faint light across the cluttered surface.

And then her eyes caught something new, something that unsettled the carefully curated disorder.

There, placed deliberately in the exact centre of her desk, was a book. Not just any book, but the very edition of Theories of the Fragment she’d mentioned weeks ago during a seminar—a volume she’d agonized over, particularly a chapter dense with elusive arguments that had kept her up long into the night. The spine bore the telltale cracks of a well-read companion, and a slender, worn bookmark peeked from deep within, nestled precisely at the page she’d found most challenging to untangle.

There was no note accompanying the book. No scrawled message or explanation to soften the deliberate gesture.

Her fingers trembled almost imperceptibly as she reached out, picking it up with a mix of reverence and uncertainty. The familiar scent of aged paper and leather binding rose to meet her, somehow more intimate than any written word could be—a silent communication that carried more weight than a letter might have.

The quiet around her seemed to deepen, thickening like a tangible presence in the room. The door creaked, breaking the stillness, and Hermione looked up to find Snape standing there. His coat was still draped over his shoulders, the dark fabric falling in sharp, precise lines. His expression remained unreadable, but his eyes—those dark, penetrating eyes—were sharper than ever, assessing without a word.

“You left this,” Hermione said quietly, holding up the book between them like a fragile token.

For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, in that clipped, measured tone so familiar to her, he responded: “I thought it might assist your work.”

She set the book down gently, folding her arms across her chest, trying to steady the flutter of emotions the gesture stirred within her. “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked, her voice steady despite the curiosity and something more tangled beneath it.

“Because it’s unnecessary to explain every action,” he replied coolly, his gaze never wavering. “You’re capable of interpreting texts without a running commentary.”

The air between them shifted, a subtle but undeniable tension threading through the room. Her heartbeat quickened in response, the undercurrent of something unspoken pressing close.

Stepping closer, Hermione closed some of the distance that had long lingered between them—the weight of years of guarded glances, clipped conversations, and silences pregnant with meaning pressing against her chest. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said softly, but with an edge of challenge.

“I didn’t,” he answered, voice low and deliberate, “I chose to.”

Their eyes locked, and the distance between them shrank imperceptibly.

Hermione’s breath hitched, the heat of his gaze settling over her like a physical presence. The office felt smaller somehow, the cluttered desks and towering shelves fading into the periphery. It was just them — two figures suspended in a quiet tension neither fully understood nor dared to name.

She swallowed hard, feeling the sudden tightness coil in her throat as if the words she was about to speak might fracture something fragile between them. She steadied herself, drawing in a slow breath, then let it out in a whisper that barely disturbed the stillness of the room. “Why now?” The question hung in the air, tentative but weighted. “Why leave this here… like some kind of message?”

Snape’s lips twitched—almost curling into a smirk, but the expression was fleeting, a ghost of amusement quickly suppressed beneath his usual mask of control. His dark eyes flicked up briefly to meet hers, sharp and unreadable. “I didn’t consider it a message,” he said coolly, the faintest edge of disdain threading through his clipped words. “Merely a useful resource.”

“Useful,” she repeated, the word slipping from her lips with a subtle bite. Her gaze narrowed, searching for meaning behind his carefully measured tone. “You’ve been distant for weeks—avoiding our meetings, giving only the barest replies—and then suddenly this. It’s… more than that, isn’t it?”

For a long moment, Snape didn’t respond. His eyes drifted away, focusing on some point beyond her, the slightest crease folding between his brows as if the question itself was an irritation to be endured rather than entertained. When he finally spoke, his voice was deliberate and guarded, each syllable weighed with precision. “You mistake my motives. I do not operate in sentiment.”

“But you left this book,” Hermione pressed, lifting the volume slightly, as if it might offer some secret proof. Her eyes locked onto his, searching for a crack in the armour—the slightest flicker of something human beneath that impenetrable veneer. “That’s… something. Something different.”

The room seemed to shrink around them, the quiet punctuated only by the soft rustling of pages as Snape took a deliberate step forward. The movement was slow, measured, almost cautious, and it sent a sudden jolt through Hermione’s chest—an electric charge she couldn’t quite explain. The lamplight caught the sharp angles of his face—the taut line of his jaw, the shadowed hollows beneath his cheekbones, the dark depths of his eyes that held something fierce and unreadable.

“You read too much into silence,” he said softly, his voice low and steady, like a warning whispered in the dark. “Or perhaps you’re just looking for cracks where there are none.”

Her heart thundered so loudly she was sure he could hear it, each beat hammering against her ribs like a call to arms. On impulse, almost without thinking, she lifted a hand and brushed a stray lock of hair back from her face—a small, unguarded gesture born of a sudden vulnerability.

The effect was immediate.

Snape flinched. It wasn’t an overt recoil, not a sudden jerk or withdrawal, but a subtle, almost imperceptible tightening—a drawing in of himself as if the touch had unsettled something deep beneath his carefully maintained composure. His eyes flickered for a brief, fragile moment before regaining their usual cold clarity.

She pulled her hand back slowly, the faintest tremor in her fingers betraying the uncertainty she tried to mask. Her lips pressed together tightly, biting down on the inside of her cheek as if to stop words from spilling out too hastily. “I’m not trying to—” she began, but the sentence died in the cool air between them.

“No.” His voice cut through the stillness, low and edged with something rare and fragile—an almost vulnerable timbre that startled her. “I am the one who must be cautious.”

The admission hung between them, heavy and unexpected. Hermione swallowed, feeling a strange tangle of frustration and sympathy twist deep within her chest. The careful walls he built around himself showed a rare crack, and it pulled at her in ways she hadn’t anticipated. “Then tell me,” she said quietly, “tell me what you want. Or what you don’t want.”

For a moment, his eyes flickered with something unguarded, raw—like a fleeting glimpse of the man beneath the mask. But it was gone in an instant, replaced by the familiar hard edge of control and distance. “What I want,” he said finally, his voice tight, “is irrelevant.”

Her breath caught, but she pressed on, leaning in just slightly, as if proximity could coax out the truth. “And what you fear?”

He hesitated, a shadow crossing his face that softened his usual stoicism. When he spoke again, his voice was barely more than a whisper, fragile as the mist outside the window. “Consequences.”

The word reverberated in the quiet room, taut and electric, filling every corner with an unspoken weight. The silence that followed was thick with meaning—charged and brittle, like the moments before a storm breaks.

Then, abruptly, as if the intensity became too much to bear, Snape turned sharply, the movement so swift it startled her. His hand reached out with practiced ease to grab the collar of his coat, pulling it around his shoulders as if to shield himself from the vulnerability he could not afford to show.

Hermione’s chest tightened painfully. The fragile moment—the possibility of something real—had slipped away again, leaving only the faint, hollow echo of what might have been.

“As always,” he said over his shoulder, voice low, “the past is best left undisturbed.”

With that, he moved toward the door. The soft click of the latch closing behind him was like a final punctuation, sealing away the tension and unspoken truths, leaving Hermione standing alone in the quiet aftermath. The room felt colder now, the lingering warmth of what almost was fading into the shadows, as if swallowed by the distance he had just put between them.

Chapter Text

The weeks after Snape’s departure from her office seemed to stretch thinner than ever, the silence between them growing heavy with things unspoken. Yet, despite the distance he insisted upon, a new kind of communication began — quiet, coded, and as elusive as smoke curling through ancient library stacks.

It started innocuously enough. One morning, as Hermione settled into her work, her fingers brushing aside a stack of drafts and photocopies, she found a folded piece of paper tucked beneath her latest dissertation chapter. The paper was yellowed at the edges, the handwriting unmistakably his: precise, sharp, and slightly angled. No salutation, no signature — just a single line, plucked from a text she’d mentioned during a seminar weeks ago:

“Language is a cracked vessel, its fragments containing both truth and deception.”

Her breath caught. The quote was from a forgotten treatise on semiotics, one she’d been grappling with in relation to her thesis. It was as if he had reached into her thoughts and extracted the very essence of her struggle — and sent it back to her, wrapped in cryptic ink.

She carried the note with her all day, turning it over in her mind as she navigated the university halls and lecture rooms. That evening, unable to resist, Hermione replied. Her response was a slip of paper left in his inbox, folded with care:

“Or perhaps the vessel is whole — but our eyes are fractured.”

Days passed, and the correspondence continued. Notes slipped silently between their desks, left in book jackets, tucked inside rare manuscripts, or hidden beneath typed pages of dense theory. Each message was a puzzle — a line from a philosopher, a marginalia annotation, a fragment of poetry — never overt, but always charged with meaning.

One note quoted Derrida: “There is nothing outside the text.” Another pulled from Rilke’s Duino Elegies: “Be ahead of all parting, as if it already were behind you.” Each phrase was a thread weaving through their separate lives, drawing them closer despite the walls they maintained.

Hermione’s replies grew bolder, mixing intellectual challenge with subtle hints of emotion. She wrote of Lacan’s mirror stage, of Barthes’ punctum, of the elusive nature of truth and desire. Her handwriting, usually neat and measured, sometimes faltered into hurried scrawls, betraying a restless heart beneath her scholar’s discipline.

Meanwhile, Snape’s notes remained restrained but unmistakably present. Occasionally, she found annotations in her drafts — a single word underlined, a question mark in the margin, a pointed correction that revealed his keen eye and unexpected care. Once, a folded note slipped between pages read:

“To dissect is to understand; to understand is to possess — but possession is not always welcome.”

The library became their silent witness. Hermione found herself lingering longer in the restricted section, waiting for the faintest sign that he might appear. Their brief exchanges — a nod, a glance — felt charged with the unspoken language they’d begun to build.

One evening, as rain tapped softly against the library windows, Hermione discovered a note that was different. This one was not a quotation or a puzzle, but a question, written in the margins of her latest draft:

“What do you fear losing more — certainty, or the possibility of being seen?”

She traced the ink with trembling fingers, feeling the raw edge of vulnerability behind the words. It was a challenge and an invitation, wrapped in a veil of academic rigor.

Hermione’s heart surged as she crafted her reply, folding it with care and slipping it into his favourite volume on phenomenology:

“Perhaps it is the space between certainty and visibility where truth truly resides.”

One damp, grey afternoon, Hermione arrived at the library with her mind still tangled in the threads of her dissertation. The familiar scent of aged paper and polished wood greeted her as she settled into her usual corner, surrounded by towers of books that felt both sanctuary and challenge. As she reached for the volume she’d been obsessively rereading, her fingers brushed against something unusual—a delicate pressed leaf, its veins still vivid despite the years, pinned carefully beneath a small, folded note. The handwriting was unmistakable: precise, controlled, yet carrying a weight that transcended mere words. The note read,

“The leaf is whole, yet its veins tell stories of fractures.”

Hermione felt a quiet smile tug at her lips, the metaphor striking deep within her. The imagery of something appearing whole while holding traces of fracture mirrored their own tenuous, fragmented exchanges—brief, cryptic, but resonant with unspoken meaning. It was as if Snape had reached through the fog of their silence to offer her a glimpse of the truth she dared not say aloud.

Moved by the gesture, Hermione took a sheet of translucent paper—thin, almost fragile, like the spaces between their conversations—and carefully wrote her reply. She folded the paper with deliberate care, folding it into a neat, unassuming square, and slipped it between the pages of a manuscript she knew Snape often consulted, a text dense with philosophical riddles and hermeneutic puzzles. Her words, drawn from the depths of her reflection, whispered back to him:

“And in those fractures, the light finds its way — illuminating what words cannot.”

It was a silent promise, an acknowledgement that their conversation, though broken and cautious, still carried the potential for revelation and connection beyond the limits of spoken language.

Several days later, Hermione found herself once again drawn to the dusty shelves of the restricted section, hunting for insights amid the labyrinth of rare texts. Her fingers traced the spine of a rare French volume on hermeneutics, worn and cracked from centuries of study. As she carefully opened the book, a small, folded piece of paper slipped from its spine and fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and unfolded it with a mixture of curiosity and a growing sense of anticipation. The note bore a brief but poignant fragment:

“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte — but there is a space beyond silence.”

 The phrase struck a profound chord. It was a nod to Derrida’s famous assertion that there is no outside-text, yet here was an acknowledgment of a mysterious realm beyond words, beyond the texts they both so meticulously analysed—a space where silence itself could speak volumes. Hermione’s fingers lingered on the paper, tracing the words as if to summon the meaning buried within. The tension between them, the careful avoidance and yearning, felt embodied in this cryptic message, hovering just beyond the margins of their lives.

Inspired by the weight of that note, Hermione returned to her desk, her mind spinning with thoughts of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility. She picked up her pen and, along the edge of her newest draft, carefully penned a response, quoting Simone Weil:

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

The phrase encapsulated the unspoken truth between them—that the simple act of noticing, of truly seeing the other, was a profound gift, especially when so much remained hidden beneath layers of caution and formality. Her handwriting was deliberate, each letter a small beacon cast into the dark space they shared.

Snape’s reply arrived not in a note, but as a marginal annotation in the treasured copy of Theories of the Fragment she guarded fiercely. His words, precise and sharp, cut through the text like a scalpel:

“And generosity, when misread, can become vulnerability — a currency too costly to spend recklessly.”

The observation was a caution wrapped in wisdom, a reminder of the delicate balance between openness and self-protection. Their exchange had evolved into a private duel of intellect and feeling, where every phrase sharpened their understanding of each other, revealing glimpses of their true selves behind the walls of academic rigor and personal restraint.

One particularly quiet evening, long after the library had emptied and the soft hum of distant footsteps had faded into the night, Hermione returned to her office. There, beneath the soft glow of her desk lamp, she discovered a final note tucked beneath her keyboard—its edges worn, the ink still vivid. The words were simple but heavy with meaning:

“We speak in fragments because the whole is too dangerous.”

She read the note twice, feeling the weight of its truth settle in her chest. It was a confession and a warning, a testament to the fragile nature of their connection, held together not by certainty but by cautious, careful fragments. The note encapsulated everything unspoken between them, and yet, in its fragmented form, it held a powerful promise—an invitation to continue weaving meaning from the spaces between.

And so the letters continued — not spoken, not confessed, but written in the shadows between theory and feeling. An intellectual and emotional affair blossomed in silence, ink, and carefully chosen words, each note a bridge across the distance they both guarded fiercely.

In the world of whispered texts and folded pages, Hermione and Snape found a connection that was as much about what remained unspoken as what was carefully inscribed — a dialogue of minds and hearts, written in the dark.

Chapter Text

The sudden blackout hit the university like a physical blow — a sharp, disorienting severance from the everyday hum of electricity that tethered everything in place. The overhead fluorescents blinked once, like a startled eye, and then died with a soundless finality. The quiet that followed wasn’t true silence, but a pressing absence — no whir of computers, no soft click of radiators cycling on, not even the ambient hum of the vending machine down the corridor.

Hermione stood frozen in the Department of Literary Theory, one hand still hovering over her notebook as her eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden dark. She had stayed behind after her meeting with a visiting scholar — a quiet, meticulous Belgian critic with a particular interest in fragmentation theory — and had been organizing her notes at the long seminar table, preparing to revise them tomorrow. The world had been stable, routine, academic. And now it wasn’t.

She blinked into the darkness. The emergency lights, normally timed to kick in seconds after an outage, failed to so much as flicker. Somewhere far off, she thought she heard a pop — perhaps a transformer blown or, more likely, a work crew had struck an underground cable. Maintenance had been digging up part of the west quad all week, cones and hazard signs crowding the footpaths like teeth. Someone had probably cut through the wrong thing.

Hermione reached instinctively for her phone, but when she pressed the power button, nothing happened. Dead. She hadn’t noticed how quickly the battery had drained — the result of an entire afternoon toggling between PDFs, her calendar, and the Oxford citation generator that always refused to cooperate.

She crossed to the hallway and pressed a hand to the door panel. No response. The badge reader blinked once, impotently, then darkened again. Her stomach dipped slightly. Without electricity, the security system failed — and with it, the department doors remained sealed from both sides. A feature meant to deter intruders. Or, apparently, to trap scholars.

She let out a breath and turned back into the corridor, walking slowly now, allowing her eyes to adjust. The faint glow of city light seeped through the narrow clerestory windows, casting faint, greyish lines along the floor. Offices were closed, some still locked, others cracked open like half-read books.

Her mind drifted — unwillingly — to one place. One door, at the far end of the corridor, behind which a small, fortress-like office stood in monastic stillness.

Snape’s.

She hesitated only a moment before turning down the hallway. It wasn’t fear that drove her toward him — or even safety, not in the traditional sense. It was… containment. Familiarity. A kind of precarious honesty that, lately, she had begun to crave in defiance of her own better judgment. If she was going to be trapped somewhere, let it be in the one place where silence had always meant something.

She reached the door and paused, uncertain. Then, knuckles barely brushing the wood, she knocked.

No answer.

Hermione tried the handle, more out of habit than hope, and to her surprise, it turned with a low metallic creak. Of course. Snape’s door had an old-fashioned mechanical lock — one of the few in the building left untouched by modernization. She stepped inside.

His office was colder than she remembered. The absence of light made it feel cavernous, the shadows more complete than simple darkness. Shapes emerged slowly: the high-backed chair, the neatly stacked folders, the bookshelves rising like sentinels on either side of the room. The scent of aged paper and ink lingered in the air — that curious, permanent blend of academia and austerity.

She stood in the stillness for a moment, listening to the soft ticking of the analogue clock on the wall. Then her eyes landed on a small box tucked into the corner of a low shelf. An old emergency kit — a relic from another age. Inside were matches, two half-used candles, a tin of herbal lozenges, and a decades-old torch that refused to turn on.

Hermione lit one of the candles, the small flame blooming weakly into life. Its flicker threw shadows that danced across the walls, illuminating the worn spines of books, the glint of metal paperclips, and the inkwell that always sat neatly to the right of Snape’s writing pad.

A soft noise behind her made Hermione start — the creak of the floor, or perhaps just the shift of air from the hallway — and when she turned, he was there.

Snape stood in the doorway, his silhouette outlined in the thick darkness of the corridor. He didn’t speak at first, only regarded her with that unreadable expression she had come to recognize as his version of curiosity, caution, and something far more difficult to name.

His eyes swept over the candle, the flickering shadows behind her, then met hers. “You’re trapped.”

It wasn’t a question. He always seemed to deal in certainties when others floundered.

She nodded, drawing her coat more tightly around her as if it might buffer the strange vulnerability between them. “The main doors are badge locked. No power, no exit. I tried my phone — dead. Yours?”

Snape’s expression didn’t change. “In my desk drawer. Off. As usual.”

“Of course,” she said, a hint of a dry smile. “You would be the only person in Cambridge who keeps it turned off as a matter of principle.”

“A matter of peace,” he corrected softly, stepping into the room. He closed the door behind him, the mechanical lock clicking into place with a soft finality. A gesture that might have seemed ominous with anyone else, but with him — it felt inevitable.

The air in the office was cooler now, the silence around them thick and layered. She could hear the faint sound of wind outside — that low whistle threading between the narrow slits of the old windowpanes — and the occasional creak of the building settling under its own history.

Snape stood a moment longer, then moved to the bookshelf opposite her and leaned against it, arms folded. The candlelight danced across his face, softening the severity of his features, tracing a gentler outline. His gaze was fixed, unflinching.

She cleared her throat. “It’s strange. We spend so much time in this building. And now, it feels like we’re trespassing.”

“We’ve made a temple out of texts,” he said, tone dry. “And tonight, we’re locked inside it.”

Hermione let out a low laugh, surprised by it. “Poetic, for someone who claims to loathe sentiment.”

“I loathe indulgence,” he said, tilting his head. “Not language.”

That sparked something between them — the old rhythm, the way their conversations had always danced along the edge of argument and intimacy. For a while, they spoke easily, if cautiously. She told him about the winter conference — the sessions on post-structuralist ethics, the panel on intertextual trauma that had devolved into a shouting match. He smirked at that, unsurprised.

“Academia as blood sport,” he murmured. “How very traditional.”

“Only with better coffee,” she replied.

They sat in that half-light for what felt like hours, the candle flickering low, their voices soft. Somewhere between a discussion of Levinas and the impossibility of ethical speech, Hermione shifted — half-slid, half-perched onto the edge of his desk, facing him more squarely. He remained where he was, but something in his posture changed: less guarded now, less angular. As though the years of distance were beginning to unspool.

There was a pause.

And then, her voice quiet: “Do you remember the letter?”

He looked at her — really looked. “Which one?”

“The one you left in the margin of my Lacan draft. About possession. Vulnerability.”

His mouth tightened slightly. Not in disdain — in memory. “I remember.”

Hermione turned the candle slowly between her fingers, the wax warm beneath her touch. “You said generosity could be mistaken. That it cost too much.”

“I said it becomes currency,” he corrected. “In the wrong hands.”

She nodded, staring into the flame. “Do you think I’ve misread yours?”

There was a long silence.

Then, carefully, he said, “No.”

Her heart beat louder in the quiet room, and the words rose before she could stop them. “Then why the restraint? Why all the silence?”

Snape was still for a moment, then straightened from the shelf, taking a slow step toward her. He was very close now — not touching, but the nearness was unbearable.

“Because silence,” he said, voice low, “is the only way I know how to keep from destroying things.”

His gaze flicked over her face, resting at last on her mouth. She felt heat bloom beneath her skin, something equal parts hope and fear.

“You wouldn’t destroy this,” she whispered.

“You don’t know that,” he said. “I don’t know that.”

Hermione swallowed, her voice steady even as her hands trembled slightly where they rested on the desk. “But we’re already here.”

He studied her for a long moment, the kind of gaze that unravelled everything she thought she’d hidden.

“Yes,” he said finally, and it sounded like surrender. “We are.”

He stepped closer, slow and deliberate, as though each movement was being weighed against its consequence. And this time, when his hand lifted, it was to brush back a strand of her hair — a single curl that had fallen loose across her cheek. His fingers hovered for a moment before making contact, grazing her skin with the gentlest whisper of touch. The sensation was electric. It raced through her like a live wire, lighting up every nerve, every quiet part of her that had been holding still for too long.

Hermione’s breath caught in her throat.

Their faces were close now — impossibly close — the space between them a suspended breath, a word left unsaid. The candlelight flickered between them, painting molten gold across his face, softening the sharp lines, illuminating the hollows beneath his eyes, the tension held in his jaw. And in his eyes — gods, his eyes — she saw a war waging itself silently. Longing and restraint, fear and need, all tangled together like roots under frostbitten soil.

The silence that hung between them was no longer the awkward, hesitant hush of colleagues navigating boundaries. It was thick. Charged. Alive.

She didn’t know who moved first.

Maybe it was mutual — a shared gravity pulling them inward, like the meeting point of two long shadows at dusk. They both leaned forward, tentatively, the movement reverent in its slowness. Their breaths mingled — his slightly uneven, hers barely there. There was the briefest of pauses, a fraction of a heartbeat where retreat was still possible. And then—

Their lips met.

The kiss wasn’t rushed or frantic. It wasn’t the stuff of heat and recklessness. It was slower. Deeper. Devastating in its tenderness. It felt like a promise and a confession all at once — the slow collapse of years spent building walls and speaking in riddles. Her hands rose instinctively, fingers curling into the coarse wool of his coat, as though anchoring herself to the reality of him. His hand cupped her jaw, thumb grazing the edge of her cheekbone, the touch almost reverent.

He tasted like quiet evenings and unresolved questions — bitter tea and the worn pages of old books — and it undid her completely.

She melted into the kiss, into him, her body tipping forward, unguarded. His other hand slid to her waist, tentative, as if unsure he had the right, even now, to hold her like this. For a few impossible moments, the world outside ceased to exist. There were no university corridors, no names on office doors, no years of difference or doctrine to separate them.

There was only the kiss — slow, fragile, infinite.

And then, like a breath breaking underwater, it ended.

Snape was the one who pulled away, but not all at once. His forehead rested against hers for a moment, his breathing shallow. His eyes searched hers with a look of such raw conflict, such desperate self-containment, that Hermione felt her chest ache. His hand was still on her cheek, but she could feel it trembling slightly.

Then he stepped back — two measured steps that widened the gulf between them. The cold rushed in where his body had been. His gaze darted away, somewhere over her shoulder, as if eye contact had become unbearable.

“This…” he began, voice hoarse, barely above a whisper. “This was a mistake.”

The words cut like glass. Her breath stuttered.

He cleared his throat, mask slipping swiftly back into place — all precision, all control. The careful composure he wore like armour reassembled itself piece by piece as he moved to the side of his desk and began collecting his notes in quick, mechanical movements. As though nothing had happened. As though his world hadn’t just tilted beneath his feet.

“This changes nothing,” he said softly, not meeting her eyes.

Hermione’s heart twisted. “Does it have to mean nothing?”

Her voice was small, but steady. She wasn’t pleading. Not exactly. But there was a thread of ache beneath the question, one that trembled with the weight of everything she hadn’t dared to hope.

He froze mid-reach, fingers hovering above a stack of papers.

His shoulders stiffened. “Yes,” he said finally. “It does.”

And she knew what he meant. Not because the kiss hadn’t meant something — it had meant everything. But because it meant too much. Because meaning was dangerous, and they both knew the cost.

The silence returned, heavier now. Thicker with the ghosts of what had just passed between them.

And then — a soft, mechanical beep.

The power had returned. Somewhere, down in the bowels of the building, the maintenance crew had reset the grid. The emergency lights flickered on in the corridor, casting long shadows through the office doorway. The badge system had reengaged. The doors were unlocked.

Freedom beckoned.

And even as they stepped into the corridor, parting with polite nods and voices carefully neutral, they both knew: there would be no forgetting. No going back.

Only the haunting memory of a kiss shared by candlelight, and the endless ache of almost.

Chapter Text

The silence after the kiss was not accidental. It was deliberate. Sharp. Necessary.

They never spoke of it. Not in the quiet corners of the department where they used to exchange glances. Not in the seminar room where Snape would normally offer her a quiet nod of approval when her comments sliced through text like scalpel through skin. Not in the pages of theory they once shared like coded love letters.

After that night in his office, something broke. And neither of them dared to acknowledge it.

The aftermath was not immediate. It unfolded slowly, like a bruise blooming beneath the skin — unseen at first, but deepening with each passing day.

Hermione withdrew first. She skipped two of their scheduled meetings. Then a third. She submitted her thesis chapters electronically, with curt emails and no comments. She stopped leaving margin notes in the texts he’d annotated. Stopped lingering after seminars. Stopped looking up.

And Snape — he didn’t chase her.

He returned her drafts with terse feedback. He cancelled a supervision session without explanation. The notes between them ceased. No quotations. No questions. No hidden leaves or fragments. Just a hollow absence where intimacy had once bloomed.

But absence had weight.

Soon, it was everywhere.

Hermione’s once-meticulous research began to lose its polish. Her footnotes grew sloppy. The connections in her arguments — once elegant, intuitive — began to unravel. She rewrote sections obsessively, unable to silence the internal voice that now sounded too much like him.

The change was subtle at first — so quiet it might have gone unnoticed by anyone not already holding their breath.

Hermione, once the golden thread running through the department’s intellectual tapestry, began to falter. During a departmental panel on textual hauntology — a subject she once would have commanded with ease — she lost her train of thought mid-sentence. Her notes, normally a precise lattice of insight, blurred before her eyes as her voice wavered. She ended early, under the pretence of a sore throat, and fled the room to the polite, confused silence of colleagues who didn’t know where the brilliance had gone.

She caught the glances. They were brief, flickering — never confrontational, but telling. Professor Rakewell raised an eyebrow as she passed him in the corridor, as though expecting some confirmation of a rumour unspoken. Dr. Yen, who once enthusiastically invited her to join panels and peer reviews, suddenly began to “forget” to forward calls for papers. Her inbox, once crowded with collaboration invitations, grew suspiciously quiet.

In the department’s common room, whispers trailed behind her like ghosts. She didn’t need to hear full sentences to know the shape of them. Her name paired with his. Questions hanging between cups of over-steeped tea.

"Granger’s been… off, hasn’t she?"

"I thought Snape was supervising her thesis?"

"He’s always been… intense with his protégés, but this—”

"Power dynamics. It’s never simple, is it?"

The tone was never accusatory. Just speculative, which somehow made it worse. Nothing to confront. Nothing to defend. Just a murmur — like water wearing away stone.

Hermione tried to bury herself in her work, but even that betrayed her. Her latest chapter was returned with more red ink than she’d seen in years. Snape’s comments were cool, surgical. Detached.

“Incoherent here.”

“Circular argument.”

“Sources need strengthening — this is beneath your standard.”

There was no note of encouragement. No glint of admiration behind the correction. No humanity. Just ink and judgment.

And still, she felt him. Down the hall. In the weight of closed doors. In the long shadow cast across the department’s corridor when she left late at night and saw a light still on in his office. He didn’t seek her out. Didn’t stop her in the hallway or linger outside her seminars. But his presence was a constant, a gravity she couldn’t escape.

She imagined him retreating behind the armour of professionalism, convincing himself that silence was safety. That distance would protect them both.

But distance wasn’t neutral. It hurt.

And worse — it invited scrutiny.

One afternoon, she entered the main office to print a submission and caught the tail end of a conversation between two administrative assistants. They fell abruptly silent when they noticed her, but the damage was done.

"...they always said he took too much interest in her..."
"...not the first time a brilliant student’s gotten too close..."
"...well, someone ought to look into it before it reflects poorly..."

Hermione clenched her jaw and walked past without comment, spine straight, hands trembling.

Nothing said outright — but everyone knows how tightly universities clutch their codes of ethics.

One afternoon, she returned to her desk to find her thesis draft covered in handwritten notes. His notes. Still incisive. Still infuriatingly right. But impersonal. Like a wall had been built through the middle of the page, and he was hiding behind it.

Hermione stared at the paper until her vision blurred. Then she opened her drawer, found the folder she kept hidden — the one with their old notes. The leaf. The quotes. The half-formed questions. She unfolded one at random.

“We speak in fragments because the whole is too dangerous.”

It gutted her.

She hadn’t meant to discover the letter.

She had gone to the department office to submit a revised outline — another draft he wouldn’t comment on in person. As she handed it in, the secretary hesitated.

“Oh, by the way,” she said, retrieving a file from the top drawer. “Professor Snape submitted this for your fellowship application last week. It’s been added to your dossier.”

Hermione blinked. “My… what?”

The secretary smiled. “Your recommendation letter.”

Hermione took the envelope with numb fingers. Her name printed in his meticulous hand. She unfolded the pages inside slowly, her pulse hammering.

It was a letter of recommendation. Three paragraphs. Tightly composed. Effusive in its praise.

“To Whom It May Concern,

It is with unwavering confidence that I write in support of Miss Hermione Granger. I have had the distinct privilege of serving as her primary advisor and mentor during her doctoral work in Literary Theory at this institution. Over the course of our academic engagement, I have witnessed a rare and formidable intellect—one marked by precision, curiosity, and a sustained commitment to scholarly rigor.

Miss Granger’s grasp of post-structuralist theory is, without exaggeration, unrivalled among her peers. Her capacity to dissect and synthesize the works of Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, and Butler with such agility and depth is a testament to both her intellect and her discipline. Her analytical style is not only incisive but original; she does not merely engage with canonical theory, but interrogates it. Her recent work on semantic fragmentation and subjectivity in marginalized narratives exemplifies her ability to traverse disciplinary boundaries and offer interventions that are as insightful as they are courageous.

What distinguishes Miss Granger above all, however, is her relentlessness—both in thought and in execution. Her writing is elegant yet forceful, her argumentation meticulous, and her intellectual integrity uncompromising...”

And at the end, in ink:

“…She is, simply put, the most formidable mind I have had the privilege of mentoring.”

No signature. Just his name. Cold. Professional. Final.

But to Hermione, it was a betrayal — and a gift. It was everything he couldn’t say to her face, sealed behind formality and power structures. It was him… trying.

And it wasn’t enough.

Hermione stood outside his office, her hand poised above the worn brass doorknob, heart hammering against her ribs. The corridor was quiet, dimmed by the late hour — the low hum of the radiator the only sound. She had read the letter that morning, found it by accident in the department secretary’s outgoing folder. It hadn’t been addressed to her. It hadn’t even been meant for her eyes.

And yet every word in it had cut through her like glass.

She opened the door without knocking. He looked up immediately, as if he'd been expecting her all along.

Not startled. Not annoyed. Just… ready.

She stepped inside. The soft click of the door behind her was louder than it should have been.

“You wrote it.” Her voice was low, but it vibrated with barely contained fury. Not a question — an accusation wrapped in disbelief.

He closed the book he’d been annotating. A long pause. Then, with that maddening calm: “Yes.”

“You weren’t going to tell me,” she said, her arms stiff at her sides.

“No,” he replied, standing slowly. The lamplight caught the edges of his face, casting half of it in shadow.

She took a step closer, hands clenched. “Why?”

He looked at her then, really looked at her — and she saw it. The exhaustion. The weight. His eyes weren’t cold. They were worn down.

“Because I owed you that much,” he said.

She laughed, but there was no humour in it. “You owed me honesty. Not a letter I had to find like a misfiled memo.”

“That letter will help you,” he said, quiet and firm. “More than anything I could say aloud. More than I have ever said.”

She shook her head, voice rising. “That’s the point, isn’t it? You could write about me. You could praise me. On paper, I’m everything. But in person? You pretend I’m nothing.”

His hands tightened around the edge of the desk, knuckles white. “You’re not nothing.”

“Then look at me,” she snapped. “Tell me I meant something. That that night—”

“You meant too much,” he said suddenly, and it silenced her.

Hermione froze, her lips still parted from the words that hadn’t finished falling. She felt her chest rise sharply, once, then again.

His voice dropped, nearly a whisper now. “That’s the problem.”

She stared at him, searching his face for mockery, denial, anything. But all she found was quiet devastation.

“I crossed a line I should never have approached,” he continued, eyes fixed on hers. “You were my student. My mentee. I should have protected you. Not kissed you. Not wanted to.”

“I kissed you too,” she whispered. “We both did.”

“I’m not blaming you.” His voice broke on the edges — the rarest of cracks. “I’m blaming me. Because I knew better.”

They stood in the hush that followed, time folding in on itself. The walls of his office, usually lined with books that spoke in hundreds of languages, had never felt so silent.

Their breathing was the only sound — in and out, like the rise and fall of a tide.

Hermione stepped forward, not with anger, but with something else — resignation, maybe. Longing, definitely.

“And now what?” she asked softly. “We pretend it didn’t happen?”

“Yes,” he said, eyes unreadable again. “That’s exactly what we do.”

“Even though it did?”

His voice was steadier now, cold again, rehearsed. “Especially because it did.”

She inhaled sharply, throat tightening around the words she still hadn’t said. That she had never stopped thinking about him. That she woke sometimes from dreams of candlelight and the warm weight of his hand on her face. That his silence was worse than any rejection.

But she said none of that. She saw it now — his walls were already rebuilt, mortar still wet between the stones.

She gave a single nod. Sharp. Final. “Thank you for the letter,” she said, voice brittle but composed.

She turned and walked to the door, her hand wrapping around the knob as her heartbeat hollow in her chest.

“Hermione,” he said quietly, just as she touched the handle.

She didn’t turn around.

“You will be brilliant,” he said, every word carefully chosen. “And this — all of this — will be nothing more than a footnote.”

Her breath caught. She closed her eyes, a single tear slipping down her cheek like a secret.

“Maybe,” she whispered, her voice so low it barely carried. “But footnotes are where the truth lives.”

Then she opened the door and stepped into the corridor, leaving behind the echo of the man who couldn’t love her aloud.

Chapter Text

The room was quiet in that reverent, anticipatory way that only academic spaces seemed to manage — where intellect carried the same gravity as sacred ritual. Every breath felt rehearsed, every movement muted by years of tradition. The walls of the Department of Literary Theory’s primary defence hall were panelled in dark, polished wood, interrupted by tall, arched windows that filtered in a wintery afternoon light. Shelves lined the perimeter, filled with leather-bound volumes whose spines bore the names of giants — Barthes, Derrida, Spivak, Foucault — watchful, silent witnesses to the rite unfolding.

The faint scent of dust and wax polish lingered in the air, and somewhere, faintly, the building’s old pipes clicked in protest of the season. Even the shadows seemed arranged with care, gathering in the corners like quiet auditors.

At the far end of the room, Hermione Granger sat upright at the defence table. Her posture was impeccable, though her hands, clasped neatly on the surface before her, betrayed the slight tremor of nerves. A bound copy of her thesis lay in front of her, the title stark in its finality and challenge:

“Margins of the Real: Ethics, Fragmentation, and the Possibility of Meaning Beyond Text.”

Bold. Unapologetic. A culmination of years of thought, erasure, re-visioning.

The committee faced her like a tribunal, four senior faculty members arranged along the opposite side of the oval. Their expressions were various shades of detached interest, familiarity, and guarded scepticism — the usual cocktail served at these academic performances. To either side of the room, a scattering of students, junior lecturers, and colleagues had gathered to witness the occasion. Some leaned forward with quiet admiration. Others with narrowed eyes, waiting for fault lines.

And at the end of the panel, seated with the stillness of someone accustomed to silencing a room with presence alone: Severus Snape.

He was a figure carved from shadow, draped in his customary black, the clean lines of his robes only adding to the severity of his appearance. His hands were steepled just beneath his chin, long fingers motionless. His gaze, when not lowered to the table, swept across the room with clinical precision — detached, unreadable.

But Hermione felt him. As acutely as if his palm were resting at the base of her neck. His presence wasn’t just noticed; it landed. Like thunder low on the horizon — not yet near, but inevitable.

She had known he would be here. He was on her committee, after all — her advisor, her mentor, her shadow in every sentence she’d ever revised. And yet seeing him now, not across a seminar table, not across candlelight — but here, in full daylight and judgment — made her pulse leap in her throat.

Their eyes met once.

A flicker. A second’s breadth. Enough for her breath to falter, for heat to pool behind her ribs, for a memory — a kiss, a silence, a letter — to resurface like a bruise beneath fresh skin.

His gaze held hers, dark and impossibly still. Not cold, not warm — guarded. He betrayed nothing. Not recognition, not encouragement, not the thousand things she wanted or feared to see. Just a look, a breath… and then he turned his eyes away, as if it had never happened at all.

Hermione swallowed.

She sat straighter, forced the tremor out of her fingers, and anchored herself with a breath. Whatever else had passed between them — a night, a fracture, a refusal — today she would speak for herself. Not to him. Not for him.

But for the work.
For the truth.
And for the version of herself that had bled onto every page now resting in front of her.

The chair cleared her throat, formal and expectant.

“Miss Granger, when you’re ready.”

Hermione rose from her chair with measured grace, the weight of the room’s silent anticipation settling on her shoulders like a mantle. The crisp rustle of her notes was the only sound as she adjusted the papers before her and looked up to meet the committee’s expectant gazes.

Her voice emerged steady, clear, and meticulously composed — the opening remarks a practiced overture. “Good afternoon. My thesis, Margins of the Real: Ethics, Fragmentation, and the Possibility of Meaning Beyond Text, explores how meaning fractures and reassembles within the interstices of language and power. It argues that truth is not a fixed point but an ongoing negotiation in the spaces between what is said, what is withheld, and what is silenced.”

She paced her argument carefully at first, each point a well-worn step, rehearsed and precise. But as she deepened into the heart of her work, something shifted beneath the surface of her voice. The academic calm began to blaze with urgency — not just intellectual, but visceral.

She spoke of Derrida’s différance, the endless deferral of meaning, but she framed it not as abstract theory but as a lived condition: “Language is a cracked vessel,” she said, “one that reveals the fractures in our understanding — the ethical failures of our interpretive acts.”

Her words were no longer just text; they carried the weight of something personal. She quoted Irigaray, not just for philosophy, but for the way identity is fragmented and reconstructed under societal constraints. Barthes was not merely cited but summoned — his notion of the “death of the author” becoming a metaphor for her own struggle to be seen beyond the margins. Simone Weil’s insistence on attention as generosity was more than a citation; it was a plea.

As she moved through her argument, her voice gained texture — the careful scholar becoming a storyteller weaving raw threads of vulnerability and strength. The audience was drawn into her rhythm, pulled toward the unspoken spaces where theory and lived experience collided.

Her hands, steady now, moved lightly across her notes — but her eyes shone with something fierce, almost defiant. She was not merely defending a thesis; she was demanding acknowledgment, grappling with the distance between brilliance and recognition, between text and truth.

When she concluded, breath catching on the last word, the room fell silent. The heavy, thick silence of a moment suspended.

Then came the questions — crisp, clinical, unavoidable.

One professor leaned forward, his gaze sharp behind wire-rimmed glasses. “Miss Granger, your use of ‘ethical failure as an interpretive lens’ is provocative. But can you clarify how this lens maintains rigor without descending into subjectivity? How do you prevent the personal from diluting the scholarly?”

Hermione nodded, welcoming the challenge. “Thank you for that question. The ethical failure I describe is not a subjective judgment but a structural condition embedded within language itself. It is precisely because interpretation is never neutral that the ethical stakes are so high. Rigor, then, is found in acknowledging this failure — in making visible the blind spots rather than pretending objectivity.”

Another professor queried the application of phenomenology to fragmented texts, prompting Hermione to articulate how lived experience fractures and refracts meaning.

Throughout, she remained composed, surgical in her responses, weaving theory with clarity and passion.

And Snape? He remained still, his slate-grey eyes unreadable. Not a single question. Not a nod of encouragement, no flicker of critique. Nothing.

The chair cleared his throat, signalling the defence’s end. “Thank you, Miss Granger. We will deliberate and return with our decision shortly.”

The panel members rose, the room’s solemnity unbroken, and filed out. Hermione sat back, her heart pounding beneath the veneer of calm. She gathered her papers slowly, breath shallow, palms slick with sweat despite her composed exterior.

Left alone in the hallway, the muffled echoes of departing footsteps made the space feel cavernous and cold. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, as if to hold herself together. Her mind raced, replaying each moment, each word. The absence of Snape’s voice echoed loudest of all.

Twenty minutes passed.

The door opened. The chair smiled, warm and congratulatory. “Unanimous. With distinction.”

Applause from a few colleagues. A handshake. A certificate in a cream envelope.

Snape was already gone.

Not a nod. Not a glance. Not a word.

The day after her defence, Hermione tried to step back into routine as if the intense scrutiny and the weight of months of work had simply evaporated. She woke early, brewed her tea with the same meticulous care she had always shown, and sat at her desk to begin what should have been a day of rest and quiet accomplishment.

Emails poured in: congratulations from professors she admired, notes from former classmates, even a few from students she’d mentored. The department newsletter had published a brief piece celebrating her successful defence — a polished, carefully worded announcement that praised her “original contributions to contemporary literary theory.” On paper, everything was perfect.

But beneath the surface, Hermione felt the taut thread of something unfinished, an echo of silence where she had expected resonance.

That evening, Ginny had insisted on a proper celebration. They gathered at The Page Turner, a cramped, cozy pub nestled just off campus. It was a favourite haunt for many students and young faculty — a place where the worn wooden beams and shelves crammed with dusty novels lent a sense of intimacy, a refuge from the rigorous world of academia.

Harry was there, leaning into the conversation with his usual easy warmth, his laughter bright and genuine. Tariq, with his quick wit and thoughtful questions, had brought a bottle of artisanal gin, a nod to Hermione’s rare indulgence. The group claimed a corner table under the low-hung lights, their faces glowing in the amber flicker.

Ginny, ever the perfect hostess, ordered rounds of pints and mixed drinks, her eyes shining with pride. “You did it, Hermione. Finally. It’s time to breathe.”

Hermione smiled, but the tight knot in her chest refused to loosen. The jokes and the clinking glasses, the easy camaraderie — all of it felt like a script she was reciting, not a scene she was living.

Harry nudged her gently, “You okay? You’ve been quiet.”

“I’m fine,” she said, forcing a smile. “Just tired, I guess.”

Tariq leaned forward, his eyes sharp but kind. “You don’t have to pretend here. You’re among friends.”

She nodded, the words lodged somewhere between truth and denial. The warmth around the table was genuine, but a shadow lurked behind her thoughts — the absence of one presence, the quiet that had followed her through the defence and now hung heavily on her evenings.

Three days later, she arrived at the faculty lounge to find an envelope resting atop her pigeonhole. It was slipped discreetly among the usual clutter of memos and notices — easy to miss, but somehow impossible not to see.

There was no name printed on the front, no departmental insignia, no official stamp. Just her initials, H.G., written in tight, slanted handwriting that stirred a familiar ache in her chest.

She picked up the envelope carefully. The parchment was thicker than ordinary paper, faintly textured, edges frayed as if it had passed through many hands or been held and re-held in moments of restless thought.

Inside: a letter.

Not on departmental stationery. Not typed.

Handwritten. Ink on parchment, edges faintly frayed, as though it had been handled too many times before being delivered.

Hermione,

I imagine you expected silence. You have been graceful enough to endure it. I owe you more.

Your defence was remarkable. Not simply for its clarity or rigor — both of which were flawless — but because it was the first time I saw you fully step out of the margins and claim the text. Not as a student. Not as a disciple. As an author.

You said once that footnotes are where the truth lives. I have lived my life in the margins — in omissions, in ellipses, in what was left unsaid. I thought silence was safety. I thought distance was dignity. But you taught me otherwise. The advisor has been advised.

So here is the truth, written plainly: I have not forgotten that night. Nor have I undone it. It lives in me as breath does. I have thought of a hundred ways to justify my restraint and none of them withstand the weight of your presence.

But I will not presume.

What stands between us is not impropriety — not anymore. Only choice. Yours. I will not initiate again. Not because I do not want to — but because it must be your hand that moves first, if there is to be movement at all.

You deserve a future that is not bound by secrecy or apology. You deserve a beginning, not a cautionary ending.

If you wish that letter to be our last exchange, I will abide by that. With silence. With respect.

But if you wish for something else… you know where to find me.

Always,
S.

 

The letter shook in her hands.

She sat down slowly on the edge of her bed, knees weak, tears welling. She didn’t know what she would choose — not yet. But for the first time in weeks, the weight in her chest shifted.

There was an opening. A crack. A line beneath the final paragraph that had not yet been written.

And Hermione Granger had always known how to read between the lines.

Chapter Text

The corridor outside Snape’s office felt impossibly long that afternoon, the weight of the letter folded deep inside Hermione’s coat pocket like a secret pulse against her side. She had reread the words countless times, each line unspooling a knot she hadn’t fully admitted existed until now.

When she reached the door, her hand hovered, then knocked — firm, steady. The silence stretched before it crept open just a crack, revealing Snape’s sharp profile framed by the dim interior. His eyes, when they met hers, held a flicker of something she could not name: surprise? Relief? Hesitation? All at once, maybe.

“Come in,” he said, voice low, steady, betraying none of the turmoil she felt.

The room was as she remembered — cluttered with books and manuscripts, the faint scent of parchment and something darker, something like musk and old smoke. The flickering afternoon light fell in dusty shafts through the high windows, casting long shadows across the floor.

Hermione stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind her. Her gaze settled on the desk — on the leather-bound volumes, the scattered notes — but she barely noticed.

“Severus,” she began, voice steady despite the trembling beneath. She pulled the letter from her pocket and unfolded it slowly, the parchment crisp beneath her fingers. “I found this.”

He nodded, expression unreadable but his eyes never leaving hers.

“I read it more times than I care to admit,” she said, biting back the rawness of emotion pooling in her throat.

Hermione took a breath, steadying herself against the storm inside. The silence stretched between them, thick and heavy, filled with all the things left unsaid over months, maybe years.

“I’ve thought about what you wrote,” she said slowly, carefully, choosing each word like a thread to pull at a tightly wound tapestry. “About the choice you left to me. About what it means — what it could mean.”

Snape’s eyes narrowed slightly, the faintest crease appearing between his brows. There was no impatience in him, no dismissiveness. Only a quiet intensity, as if he was waiting for her to shape the words that would decide everything.

Hermione stepped forward, her gaze unwavering. “I choose you.”

The words hung in the air, clear and resolute.

He blinked, just once, as if surprised by the weight of that simple declaration. Then his mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly — the barest hint of a smile, or perhaps something closer to relief.

“Not as my mentor,” she continued, voice firmer now, emboldened by the truth she was finally daring to speak aloud. “Not as the professor who guided my research. I am no longer your student, Severus. I am no longer bound by those roles, those expectations. I am myself. And I choose you.”

His gaze softened, and the carefully constructed walls that had long protected him seemed to falter just a bit. The room, cluttered and dim, felt charged — every shadow, every book on his shelves, witnesses to a moment neither of them could have predicted.

“It changes everything,” he said quietly, voice rougher than before.

“Yes,” she whispered, stepping closer still, the space between them charged but no longer a chasm. “It changes everything.”

He reached out then, hesitant but deliberate, his hand brushing against hers, fingers tracing a line of fire along her skin. “And what of the consequences?” he asked softly. “Of the world beyond these walls — of the department, of your future, of mine?”

Hermione held his gaze, steady and unwavering. “I’ve thought about that, more than you know,” she said softly. “The world outside these walls won’t stop spinning because of us. I’ve accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Philosophy Department. It’s a fresh start — a place where I can build my own path, independent of the shadows here.”

Snape’s eyebrows lifted slightly, a flicker of surprise and maybe pride crossing his features. “A post-doc,” he repeated. “Well-earned.”

“Yes.” She nodded, the weight of months of searching and waiting lifting with the words. “They offered me the position just last week. It’s an opportunity I couldn’t refuse — but it also means I’m no longer confined to the roles I had here. I’m free.”

He considered her for a long moment, then reached out more confidently, his fingers curling around her hand. “Free,” he echoed, voice low and deliberate. “To make choices, to take risks.”

She took a small step closer, her breath catching as the distance between them vanished. “Yes. And I choose to take this risk — with you.”

His eyes darkened, a storm of unsaid emotions swirling within their depths as they searched hers with an intensity that seemed to hold every secret they’d both kept locked away. It was as if he was trying to memorize the way her eyes flickered with unspoken truths, committing the very essence of her to memory before closing the distance that had lingered between them for far too long. Slowly, deliberately, he leaned in, closing the final fragile space.

Their lips met—soft, hesitant at first, trembling on the edge of uncertainty. It was a gentle brush, a tentative exploration, like the fragile tip of a blade just barely grazing the skin. Yet beneath that softness was an undercurrent of something much deeper: the fragile hope that what they were about to do wouldn’t shatter everything, the fear that it might. The moment stretched, fragile and fragile, but with every second the kiss deepened, gathering strength, certainty, and a fierce, aching tenderness born of years spent holding back.

The kiss grew slow and deliberate, every movement weighted with meaning. His lips moulded against hers with a careful reverence, never rushing but never hesitating. It was a confession, a plea, and a promise all at once. The heat between them built steadily—a quiet fire smouldering beneath layers of restraint, finally allowed to blaze. When they finally broke apart, their breaths came ragged, chests rising and falling in unison, the air between them crackling with a charged new energy. The room around them seemed to shift, the shadows that had once seemed permanent and oppressive now pushed back, replaced by something raw and urgent.

Snape’s hand left hers, moving with a featherlight touch that sent an electric shiver racing down her arm. His fingers traced a slow, deliberate path, from her wrist, along the inside of her forearm, before coming to rest lightly on the curve of her waist. The warmth of his skin against hers felt like an anchor, steadying Hermione even as the fire inside her surged and spread. Her breath hitched, caught between disbelief and desire. Without thinking, her fingers tangled into the thick strands of his dark hair, clutching gently as if to tether herself to this moment—this man—who had loomed so large in her life for so long.

Everything outside the room—the faint dust motes floating lazily in the fading light, the towering shelves stuffed with leather-bound tomes, the lingering scent of old parchment and faint smoke—faded into insignificance. All that mattered was the sharp ache igniting between them, a desperate hunger born from years of silence and longing finally released.

His breath, warm and steady, brushed her cheek as he pulled back just enough to whisper, his voice low and rough with emotion long held in check, “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this.”

Hermione’s lips curled into a trembling, almost shy smile, her heart pounding so fiercely it threatened to drown out everything else. Without hesitation, she captured his mouth again—this time with a fierceness that matched the storm inside her. She poured every fragment of longing, relief, and unspoken yearning into the kiss. Their bodies pressed closer, the delicate boundary between control and surrender shattering as they finally gave in to the reckless, overwhelming truth between them.

The afternoon sun dipped behind gathering clouds, casting long shadows through the tall windows, but inside the room, light seemed to gather—bright, fierce, and unyielding. Outside, the world carried on, oblivious to the quiet revolution taking place within those four walls, where two lives that had been held apart at last collided in a kiss that promised everything and nothing at all.

Chapter Text

The late afternoon sun filtered softly through the tall windows of Hermione’s study, casting warm pools of light across the scattered papers and open books that cluttered her desk. She sat hunched over a freshly printed draft of their joint paper—an ambitious, dense work exploring ethical paradoxes in contemporary theory—and carefully scanned the margins, where she’d left meticulous notes and comments for Severus to review.

Her pen hovered above a particularly complex passage, the words demanding her full attention:

 

“The ethical subject, as posited within the frameworks of post-structuralist thought, occupies a paradoxical position wherein agency is both enabled and constrained by the intertextual matrices that constitute identity. Drawing upon Derrida’s concept of différance, we see that meaning—and by extension, ethical responsibility—is perpetually deferred, fractured across an infinite play of signifiers. This destabilizes the notion of a fixed, autonomous moral agent and compels a reconceptualization of ethics as an ongoing negotiation within the margins—spaces traditionally relegated to silence, ambiguity, and omission.

Furthermore, when we integrate Irigaray’s feminist critique of phallocentric language structures, the ethical imperative emerges not solely as an abstract universal but as one deeply enmeshed in the embodied, relational experience of the Other. Here, ethical failure is revealed not merely as a lapse in judgment but as an epistemic rupture—a fissure within the interpretive process that foregrounds the limitations of language to fully encapsulate alterity.

Thus, the subject’s ethical engagement must be understood as inherently fragmentary, embedded within the tensions between presence and absence, disclosure and concealment. This fragmentarity is not a deficit but a necessary condition for meaning’s emergence beyond the tyranny of totalizing discourse. The ‘footnotes’ of lived experience—those marginal, often overlooked sites—become pivotal loci where truth, responsibility, and transformation converge.”

 

Hermione’s mind traced the labyrinthine ideas, feeling their resonance beyond the page, beyond theory — into something lived, felt, shared.

Then something caught her eye: a small, folded piece of paper tucked between the pages. It hadn’t been there before, she was certain. Her fingers trembled slightly as she reached for it, unfolding the delicate sheet with reverence. The ink was unmistakable—Severus’s handwriting, familiar and intimate.

 

Hermione,

In the margins of our work, between the lines of theory, there lies a truth unspoken — a possibility that has taken root beyond these pages.

I ask you, not as your mentor, nor colleague, but as the man who has come to cherish you beyond measure: Will you marry me?

Not with grand declarations or fanfare, but here, in the quiet spaces we share, in the footnotes of our lives.

Yours, always,
S.

 

Hermione’s breath caught. A slow, radiant smile blossomed as mist gathered behind her eyes. The note was a secret meant only for her — a tender proof of a love that had grown quietly, fiercely — written in the language they alone understood. Her heart swelled with a mixture of surprise and deep, steady certainty.

Hermione’s breath caught, a smile blooming slowly as mist gathered behind her eyes. The note felt like a secret meant only for her, a tender proof of a love that had grown quietly but fiercely — written in the language they alone understood. Her heart swelled with a mixture of surprise and deep, steady certainty.

She folded the note with care, slipping it back between the pages as if tucking away a fragile treasure.

Later that evening, Hermione found herself tracing the familiar stone path that led to Severus’s office, each step steady but charged with a quiet anticipation. The ancient oaks flanking the walkway seemed to lean in closer, their gnarled branches whispering secrets in the gentle twilight breeze, as if the very trees held their breath, waiting for what was about to unfold. The campus was cloaked in soft shadows, the fading light stretching long and mellow like the pause before a whispered confession.

As she reached the heavy wooden door, she noticed it was slightly ajar, a warm, golden lamplight spilling out and pooling onto the worn stone floor of the corridor. The faint scent of parchment and musk drifted into the cool evening air. Hermione’s heart quickened, her hand tightening instinctively around the folded paper nestled deep in her palm.

Inside, Severus sat behind his desk, hunched over a pile of manuscripts. His dark eyes lifted slowly, locking onto hers. For a moment, they were unreadable—sharp and guarded as ever—but then, almost imperceptibly, the corners of his mouth twitched into a small, knowing smile that softened the stern planes of his face. It was a smile that held relief, warmth, and something like hope.

Without a word, Hermione stepped forward and extended the folded note toward him. Their fingers brushed briefly as he took the paper, his touch lingering just a moment longer than necessary.

Silence settled between them like a fragile thread stretched taut — a suspended breath bridging years of restraint and the unspoken promises of what lay ahead. Neither dared to speak, as if words might shatter the delicate moment.

Then, with a slow, deliberate nod, Hermione conveyed everything she couldn’t put into speech: trust, choice, surrender. The single movement held a gravity that resonated through the quiet room.

Severus’s smile deepened, becoming rare and genuine—a soft curve of lips that spoke volumes. Rising from his chair, he closed the distance between them with a deliberate calm, his hand reaching to cradle her waist as he pulled her gently but firmly toward him.

Their bodies aligned, the faint heat of his skin against hers breaking the last of the barriers. He leaned in, capturing her lips with a kiss that was both tender and urgent, a reclamation of all the moments they’d lost.

As their mouths parted briefly, his voice came low, rough against her lips, a whispered vow meant only for her ears: “Forever, Hermione.”

The words settled between them like a sacred promise, as his lips met hers once more—slow, deep, and unyielding—binding them in the quiet sanctuary of the office, beneath the watchful gaze of ancient books and fading daylight.

No grand gestures, no loud proclamations. Just the quiet joining of two souls, fully seen and deeply committed.

He slid a well-worn, leather-bound book toward her, one she recognized instantly: The Ethics of Ambiguity, a shared favourite, marked with notes from both their hands.

She traced the embossed title, and he whispered, “For our beginning — written between the lines.”

Hermione smiled, her heart full.

And in that gentle, unassuming moment, a new chapter began.